THE SOCIAL WORK OF 
CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 



ALVA W, TAYLOR 



MB 




Book ^L 

Copyright N° 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



THE SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN 
MISSIONS 



The Social Work of 
Christian Missions 



By 
ALVA W. TAYLOR 

Professor of Social Service aria Christian Missions in 
The Bible College of Missouri 



* 



Cincinnati 

The Foreign Christian Missionary Society 

1911 






COPYRIGHT, I9II 
BY ALVA W. TAYLOR 



©ClA30d8l7 



PREFACE 



This volume is designed for those who are inter- 
ested in the humanitarian phases of Christian missions. 
The paramount interests of our time are social. For- 
eign missions furnish an inexhaustible opportunity 
for social endeavor, and contribute annals in social 
progress such as are being written in no other field of 
human endeavor. It is the hope of the author that 
this volume may be a source of information and in- 
spiration to those who have been aroused by present- 
day missionary movements among laymen, women, 
students, and the young people of the Churches. It 
is especially designed as a help to mission classes in 
schools and churches. For those classes that desire 
a short series of studies the introduction, the six chap- 
ters, and a review will furnish a division of material; 
for those who wish a series of lessons extending over 
a longer period, one or more sections can be used for 
each assignment. The sources for the work are enu- 
merated in a bibliography at the end of the volume. 
An especial debt is due Volume III, of Dr. Dennis, 
great work on "Christian Missions and Social Prog- 
ress," in the writing of sections 2, 3, and 4 of Chapter 

5 



PREFACE 

V, and to Dr. Williamson's little volume entitled, 
"The Healing of the Nations," in sections 3 and 4, in 
Chapter III, and to Volume VIII, of the Edinburgh 
Conference Report, in section 3 of Chapter VIII. I 
am grateful to my colleague, Professor Charles E. 
Underwood, for assistance in revising the manuscript. 



CONTENTS 



INTRODUCTION 

PAGE 

The Social Task of Missions 11 

1. The Missionary as a Social Force, (ll) 

2. The Social Work of the Missionary. (16) 

3. Christianity as the Universal Faith. (25) 

CHAPTER I 
Things Figures Can not Tell 33 

1. By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them. (33) 

2. The Story of the Figures. . (39) 

3. The Leaven in the Lump. (49) 

4. Time and the Tides. (56) 

5. The Man and the Idea. (64) 

CHAPTER II 

The Home: The Corner-Stone of Civiliza- 
tion 71 

1. House or Home. (7l) 

2. The Index of Progress. (79) 

3. Man Everything, Woman Nothing. (84) 

4. The Divine Right of Childhood. (93) 

5. The Missionary Home, A Social Center. (99) 

7 



CONTENTS 
CHAPTER III 

PAGE 

Benevolence : The Heart of Social Progress, 107 

1. The Evangel of Humanity. (107) 

2. Clinical Christianity. (113) 

3. The Devastations of Ignorance. (119) 

4. One Multiplied by a Thousand. (127) 

5. Conquest at the Point of the Lancet. (132) 

CHAPTER IV 
Education : The Means of Progress 141 

1. The Missionary Contribution to Culture. (l4l) 

2. Creating a Leadership. (150) 

3. Turning Liabilities into Assets. (156) 

4. Teaching the Mothers of the Race. (163) 

5. Education as an Evangelizing Agency. (169) 

CHAPTER V 

The Missionary and the Affairs of the 

World 176 

1. The Missionary and Other Powers of 

Progress. (176) 

2. The Political Influence of the Mis- 

sionary. (181) 

3. Making Two Blades of Grass Grow 

Where One Grew Before. (189) 

4. The Pioneer of Civilization. (195) 

5. The Missionary and Universal Peace. (20l) 

8 



CONTENTS 
CHAPTER VI 

PAGE 

The Social Way to Unity 209 

1. The Field and the Kingdom. (209) 

2. The Things that Unite and the Things 

that Divide. (215) 

3. Breaking Down the Walls of Division. (22 1) 

4. The Day of Opportunity. (228) 

5. The Call of the Cross. (234) 

Appendix 241 

Bibliography. (241) 
Class Questions. (245) 

Index 258 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE V 

Reading Room in Y. M. C. A. at Tienstin, 

China 15 v 

Baseball Team of St. John's University, 

Shanghai, China 22 

Old Examination Stalls at Nankin, China . . 35 v 

A Modern School at Chentu, West China . . 35\f 
A Native Church, Marshall Islands, South 

Pacific Seas 62 » 

Officers of a Native Church in the Mar- 
shall Islands 62 v 

Rahuni Vernacular School, Marathi Mis- 
sion, West India 93 ' 

A Missionary Home in the Tropics 99 ^ 

Hospital at Hanyang, China lll v 

Koords, Syrians, and Moslems in a Mis- 
sionary Clinic 118 v/ 

A Chinese Orphan Girl before and after 

Treatment in a Missionary Hospital. . 118 
Native Medical Staff, Union Medical Col- 
lege, Peking 132 v 

Dormitory, Union Medical College, Peking. 132 • 

Ajiner College, North India 146 

A Class in Carpentry, Rhodesia, Africa .... 156 

Cotton Weaving in India 156 

First Class of Christian Inquirers in Tibet. 172 '• 

Advanced Class in Urumia College, Persia. 172 

Hospital Ward, Kiukiang, Central China.. 180 

Reid Christian College, Lucknow, India ... 195 

Sectional View of Nankin University 223 

Faculty of Nankin University 233 

10 



INTRODUCTION 



THE SOCIAL TASK OF MISSIONS 

1. The Missionary as a Social Force. 

Christianity is the religion of humanity. Jesus 
most often spoke of himself as the Son of Man. In 
the use of that term he desired to identify himself 
with humanity. He was God's idea of a man. In his 
humanity we find one of the divinest factors in revela- 
tion. There is little danger that the Church will 
lose sight of his divinity. It has ever emphasized 
his oneness with God the Father, but it has not al- 
ways so emphasized his oneness with men. If we have 
not a divine Christ we have no Christ, but if we lose 
the human in Christ, we lose his power to reach the 
world. The Apostle's great desire for his followers 
was that they " might rise to the fullness of the stature 
of manhood which is found in Christ Jesus." To be 
a perfect man is to be Godlike. It was to that per- 
fection of manliness that Jesus wished to lift the world. 
And true Christianity goes into the world to create 
manhood and womanhood. But Christian manhood 
is never selfish; it "seeks not its own, is not puffed up." 
Jesus would save the world by making men the sav- 
iors of their kind. There is no salvation except through 
service. The Christian individual is socialized. In- 

11 



INTRODUCTION 

dividual power without social conscience is the most 
dangerous weapon to put into mortal hands. The 
writer who said it was worth while to fertilize the fields 
of Europe with the blood of millions if thereby one 
Napoleon could be created, expressed the very an- 
tithesis of Christianity. 

The socialized individual is the real working factor 
in the world's uplift. A materialistic evolution may 
sneer at the missionary and at all benevolence, but a 
Christian evolution sees in benevolence the most 
active factor in the civilizing process. When Emerson 
described civilization in terms of woman's power and 
influence, he only described it in terms of benevolence, 
for it is the spirit of altruism that overcomes selfish- 
ness and compels man to give womankind their rights. 
The progress of civilization can be told in terms of 
altruism and the processes of socialization. Strong 
individuals may be developed by the ''struggle for 
self," but society advances through the "struggle 
for others." This "struggle for others" is the law 
of Christianity. It is the ferment of social service 
that is leavening the world with good. Christian 
personality is not that of the "superman," but that 
of the great-hearted lover of his kind; it has an "en- 
thusiasm of humanity," the power to see the view- 
point of others, to sympathetically enter into their 
lives and to lift them up. The missionary is the 
model of Christly aspiration in his faith in humanity's 
potentiality, and in his self-forgetting determination 
to lift up the lowest of men. 

The Kingdom of God is a new social order. It is 
a Republic of Humanity, a realization of the life of 

12 



INTRODUCTION 

God in the society of men. Jesus said his mission 
was "to give life and to give it more abundantly." 
To give life one must give the things that make life 
worth while. He can not give life to the slum and leave 
the slum, nor can he take it to the heathen world and 
leave the world heathen. Shakespeare said, " He who 
takes the prop to my house takes my house." The 
goods of life are its "props." A man's life does not 
consist in the abundance of the things he possesses, but 
his possessions in terms of habit, custom, ideas, homes, 
friends, environment, and ideals are so much a part 
of him that the worth of the lives of men are largely 
measured by the value of such possessions. The King- 
dom of God is to be rooted into the earth. The task 
of Christ was to save the world, not merely to save a 
few out of the world. The "kingdoms of this world 
are to become those of our Lord and his Christ." He 
would save commerce to honesty and a true social 
service; politics to purity and as the chief bond of 
communities in their fraternal life; religion to human 
service and as the strongest factor for binding the peo- 
ples of the earth together. The Kingdom of God is to 
include all nations and peoples in a social bond that 
will put an end to strife and bloodshed, and bring peace 
to all the earth. It is to so reorder human relation- 
ship that all men will be privileged to dwell in a de- 
mocracy of right, where there will be no tyranny, no 
expropriation of the things of another, no class privi- 
lege, and no deprivation of opportunity to him who is 
worthy. Its ideal may be millenniums away, but vast 
strides have already been made toward it, and if one 
has faith in the eternal purpose and might, he can not 

13 



INTRODUCTION 

doubt the final issue. But men are "to be workers 
together with God," in bringing these things to pass. 
A theological Christianity has failed to save the 
world. The saving power of Christianity has ever 
been its interest in men and its faith that the fact of 
Christ, once planted in their hearts, would accomplish 
the task. We must have a theology. It is only a 
systematic statement of our knowledge and theory 
of divine things. But sociological Christianity is 
our knowledge and theory at work. Henry D. Lloyd 
called it "organized friendliness." In the middle 
ages it was thought an acceptance of the creed was suf- 
ficient unto salvation. Peoples were given the choice 
of the dogma or the sword. St. Olaf went through 
Scandinavia, singing psalms and coercing by the sword, 
until he had "Christianized" the land. Charlemagne 
sent priest and soldier together, and our Anglo-Saxon 
forefathers accepted death by the thousands rather 
than take that kind of "salvation." Great bishops 
used the pomp and awe of ceremonial, and lured with 
promises of escape from torment by mere submission 
to baptism and an abandonment of the idols. St. 
Xavier sprinkled drops of water on the heads of 
multitudes in Goa and reported tens of thousands of 
conversions; ringing his bell, he would call the crowds 
together, and the simple message, "be baptized and 
you are saved," found little opposition; but he left 
no better life behind him. Charlemagne established 
churches and schools, and lifted up the converted 
masses somewhat, but his converts were mostly "bap- 
tized pagans," and Europe was Christian in name only. 
The same story is written in the history of Latin 

14 



INTRODUCTION 

America. It is yet starkly hea£hen for the most part. 
There was no social message; Christianity did not 
mean the implanting of new ideals of society. It is 
in its social message that Christianity outruns the 
other missionary religions in its permanent power to 
uplift, and in the measure that it has implanted social 
principles, has its missionary message taken the rootage 
among a people that brought permanent success. It 
becomes a civilizer through its implanting of humane 
principles and social ideals in the hearts of its converts, 
and they leaven the whole of the life about them. 
Immediate conversion is not always the means of doing 
the best work. The planting of the Kingdom of God 
may be slow, but it will, in the end, bring forth its 
fruitage in the greater abundance if it is securely 
planted. No true missionary despises numbers, neither 
does he count names on the church roll his success; 
his gauge of success is that of regenerate lives and the 
building up of a community of regenerate folk, with 
all the endowments of modern Christian civilization. 
A civilization can not be lifted by speculation or by 
a syllogism, and it was never lifted by a legend. It is 
not our theories about Christ, but our implanting 
of the life of Christ, with all it means to our civiliza- 
tion in higher ideals, purer thinking, better homes, 
greater equality, more value on life as such, a higher 
standard of living, and more of the spirit of service, 
that brings the world to him. When we "take chem- 
ists for our cooks, and mineralogists for our masons," 
we will put our dependence in a theological Christian- 
ity to save the world. "The old creeds are not fitted 
to harmonize with the intellectual, social, and moral 

15 



INTRODUCTION 

power of the modern world," says Mr. T. E. Slater, of 
India. 

The new-born society of the missionary community 
means problems in dress reform, in housing, in hygiene 
and sanitation, in education and the art of healing, 
in more democratic relationships, a new family order, 
in the readjustment of the place of womankind in 
society and the home, and, in time, in railroad build- 
ing, international commerce, diplomacy, and all those 
arts of social intercourse that characterize civilization 
at its highest. Through these arts of socialization 
and civilization the missionary confers upon all the 
society about his Christian community the social 
blessings of his gospel. He thus lifts all into a more 
proximate relationship to his gospel, and shortens 
the step they must take in order to come into the King- 
dom. Then he may hope for true "mass conversions." 
Most men move with the crowd; they think and act 
together. When all custom and thought is lifted 
near the Christian level, multitudes find it possible 
to join the Christian host. 

2. The Social Work of the Missionary. 

The missionary is the pioneer of all progress 
among the nations to which he goes. Following the 
method of his Master, he goes to change the hearts 
of individuals, and when he has changed their hearts 
he has so changed their attitude toward all life that 
he has inaugurated a new era in their midst. The 
change he makes in them is such that all better things 
are a part of their future quest. 

The social question is simply the question of the 
16 



INTRODUCTION 

other fellow. Its final solution rests in the Golden 
Rule and the caring for things of others as if they were 
our own. Heathenism cares little for the other fellow. 
It has no charity worthy the name; it knows little of 
self-control in appetite, temper, or ambition; its gods 
are selfish, and its passions are intemperate; its con- 
ceit is monumental and commensurate only with its 
ignorance; each seeks that which is his own, and the 
fates may take the hindmost. There is little social 
welfare attempted by paganism; Christianity alone 
rests upon social service. 

Like his Master, the missionary goes to give a more 
abundant life. He creates within man a desire for 
the larger things, and so adds to their lives that living 
becomes a new thing to them. It has been said that 
when a savage is converted, he immediately wants a 
stool, a suit of clothes, and a book. The first is the 
symbol of all those implements of domestic art that 
make for home and domestic comfort; the second 
stands for decency, courtesy, and virtue; the last is 
the beginning of education. 

Let it be here said that the missionary does not 
go to impose an American type of architecture or 
tailoring, nor to make any peculiar Western custom 
of living the distinctive type of the new manner of 
life. He is not sent to Anglicize or Occidentalize, 
but to create a new heart and to reorder native customs 
according to the dictates of cleanliness, both within 
and without. When he has created the new creature, 
he needs but to lead him in the cleansing and repair 
of his ancient habits of life, and a rebuilding according 
to the environment in which his lot is cast, and by the 

2 17 



INTRODUCTION 

best use of the material that fortune has placed at 
his hand. It is not the missioner's part to change 
racial customs, except where they are hurtful. He is 
there to build up a nationalism, and create a patriotism 
that is peculiar to the people to whom he has gone. 
It is not his task to plant a foreign flag, nor is he 
the emissary of commerce, though his work opens the 
pathway for the trade of all industrial peoples. 

The new aspiration is the beginning of all things 
new. Bishop Colenso was a brilliant and benevolent 
man. He reasoned, however, that as in religion is 
the quintessence of human attainment and refinement, 
it could be best taught after a barbarous people had 
learned some of the arts of civilization and been brought 
by education to a state where they could appreciate 
the high things of the spirit. He accordingly went 
to the Zulus with industrial schools, and offered them 
better houses to dwell in. They looked on with awe, 
but did not see why they should adopt the white man's 
house or implements, and made little attempt to imi- 
tate. Two humble and unlearned Dutch missionaries 
had founded a mission a day's journey away, in the 
simple faith that if they could create a new heart in 
the black man, all these other things could be added. 
They taught heart and hand together. After some 
years of effort, Colenso rode across to their mission 
one day, and throwing a bag of fifty golden sovereigns 
on the office table, said, "You have won." Samuel 
Marsden tried to put the material arts of civilization 
first in New Zealand and, after twenty years of trial, 
confessed his error in method; within a single genera- 
tion the whole people were transformed by putting 

18 



INTRODUCTION 

first things first and creating a new life within the 
savage Maori breast. When Christianity had found 
lodgment in the heart of the savage Africander, he 
nursed his benefactor, Robert Moffat, with the tender- 
ness of a woman. The French gave the Arabs stone 
cabins, and the proud, old sheik thanked them for 
so excellent a shelter for his sheep. The Canadians 
built cedar huts for the Chippewas of the Northwest, 
and they herded their dogs in them, while they held 
to the immemorial custom of freezing in wigwams. 
The missionary went to both, and by creating a new 
desire, taught them to build their own houses. Wher- 
ever he goes, the nomads build fixed habitations, the 
warlike become tillers of the soil, the piratical learn 
the arts of industry, and the slave-holding come to 
honor labor. 

Buckle lays it down as an axiom in the philosophy 
of history, that progress comes from within — it can 
not be conferred as a gift, it must be won out of a de- 
sire that will fit for its attainment. It is for that 
reason that men, who, like Sir Andrew Frasier, have 
been colonial administrators for thirty years, testify 
that Christian missionaries do more than all the power 
of an empire can do to regenerate a nation. 

No more effective testimony to the social benefits 
of Christian missions could be given than the contrast 
between two villages — the one heathen and the other 
Christian. In the heathen village the garbage is 
in the street, the houses are in a more or less tumble- 
down condition, the roofs are awry and full of leaks, 
the children run naked, the women are in rags, dirt 
is omnipresent, vice is written on most of the counte- 

19 



INTRODUCTION 

nances, hoplessness overcasts the faces of the many, 
and absurd custom, with its counterpart of supersti- 
tion, is everywhere rife. In the Christian village the 
house may be no larger, but it will be clean ; the toil 
may be little more remunerative, but it will be more 
persistent; the children will be clothed, and the women 
neat in native garments; the village street no longer 
reeks with filth, and an angle of uprightness has seized 
upon things ; faces take on a new light, hope is in every 
countenance, and superstition has given place to an 
enlightenment that is in striking contrast to the old 
manner of living and doing. The ribaldry of heathen 
song has given over to the quiet of Christian cheer, 
the riot of heathen sport has surrendered to the order- 
liness of Christian pleasure, and in place of the vile 
rites of superstition comes an enlightenment wherein 
instruction in righteousness and temperance is made 
to worship God. 

The missionary's home is a social settlement in 
the midst of a pagan community. There he exemplifies 
the improvements that civilization offers to humble 
natives, and shows forth the heart of it in the art of 
Christian living. There woman is honored and chil- 
dren accorded rights that heathenism has never rec- 
ognized. On these two facts the arch of civilization's 
triumph is founded, and the key of it is Christian love. 

The missionary translates books on every theme 
that relates to human welfare, and opens a new world 
to the astonished eyes of ancient half-civilizations. 
He inaugurates philanthropy and heals the bodies of the 
sick and provides for the lives of the abandoned and 
teaches the blessed art of caring for one another. The 

20 



INTRODUCTION 

old barbaric heartlessness is supplanted by a touch of 
mercy, and self-immolation and mutilation give way 
to deeds of fellow-help. He plants schools and is 
to-day actually instructing more than a million and a 
half of the youth of pagan lands. From these come 
the makers of to-morrow in every heathen nation. 
Through his institutions of learning in China, the 
whole empire has changed immemorial customs of in- 
struction. Verbeck taught the makers of the new 
Japan and founded the Imperial University in Tokio. 
The industrial schools at Lovedale and Blantyre have 
been multiplied into hundreds, and from each goes 
forth a roll of men with new hearts, trained minds, 
and skilled hands, ready for the practical work of 
starting civilization. Education and philanthropy 
become the web upon which Christianity, by the 
hands of the missioner, weaves the woof of a nation's 
life into a new fabric. He is the only foreigner there 
with no exploiting aim, but only to do the people good. 
For a time he may not be comprehended, and may 
often have to suffer for the judgment others have be- 
gotten in the native mind for all men of his color, 
but in the end he is understood and multitudes arise 
to call him blessed. 

Missionaries have done more than evangelize, 
translate books, found schools and hospitals, teach 
industry, and preach the gospel by a model home 
life and a character that is upright. They have ad- 
vised governments regarding important innovations 
making for progress and peace. They have added to 
earning power by invention, and have introduced 
revolutionary ideas in commerce and agriculture. 

21 



INTRODUCTION 

They have overcome hurtful customs in the name of 
comfort and humanity, and opened new avenues for 
adding to the material welfare of the people. They 
have taught native races the value of untouched re- 
sources and the waste of uneconomic habits. There 
has been no boon that could be given that they have 
not given, and in their delivery of a religious message 
they have ever counted that any gift made to the 
intelligence, comfort, cleanliness, neighborliness, earn- 
ing capacity, or any other means of social welfare, 
was a part of their work and an honor to their Master, 
who went about doing good. 

Heathenism has never valued life highly for its 
own sake. For that reason suicide has been easy, 
and the murder of infants frightful. Christian mis- 
sions puts life in the scale of values and finds it of 
supreme worth. The missioner has gone where canni- 
balism was openly practiced and has abolished it; 
slavery has yielded to his persuasion on a hundred 
mission fields ; infanticide has become a crime wherever 
his hold has been established; woman has been raised 
from the position of a chattel to that of a companion 
to man in the ratio that his message has been adopted, 
and woman owes more to the missionary than to any 
other active factor in the world of affairs. Customs 
that have been a torture to the flesh and signs of sub- 
servience have been abolished, worship has been 
turned from the insanities of mutilation and ascetic 
denial to the sweet reasonableness of praise and prayer 
and the help of fellow-man. 

Suspicion is a species of social paralysis in heathen- 
dom. Where there is no fellow-trust there can be no 

22 







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INTRODUCTION 

fraternal bond. Trade is not conducted there in trust, 
but in distrust; it is not so much the normal means of 
building up the economic life as it is a subterfuge for 
preying upon your kind; it is a species of knavery 
under a flag of truce, so to speak, for it is a battle of 
wits and a warfare of deceit. Government is for the 
sake of those who have the power rather than for the 
sake of the governed, and "justice is sold for a bribe 
and the poor for a pair of shoe-;." Few men trust 
their neighbors, and every man is regarded as a rogue. 
The missioner establishes the virtue of fellow-trust 
in his convert and makes him a man worthy of trust. 
Upon this virtue the solid fabric of a better order of 
society is builded, and from the ranks of the mission- 
ary's pupils governments and commercial houses select 
men for their trustworthy agents. The growth of the 
Christian community in the midst of a native popula- 
tion strengthens the bonds of credit and proves by 
degrees that honesty is the best policy. Administra- 
tion in the hands of native Christians gives the sub- 
jects of law a taste of integrity in government, and 
raises the demand for the same uprightness among 
all officials. 

Certain philosophers of history once urged the 
theory of the hero as the creator of progress. To-day 
we have a revision of that theory in favor of the group, 
who in the midst of mankind become a leaven of new 
ideas and better customs, and from whom arise the 
leaders and the teachers of a better day. They think 
out better ways in an interchange of ideas and ex- 
emplify their ideals in their own manner of living and 
doing. This is democracy's revision of the monarchical 

23 



INTRODUCTION 

theory of the hero. This is the process of the mis- 
sionary evangel in its social work. Christian mis- 
sions create a new manner of life among groups of 
natives and they become a leaven in the whole lump, 
illustrating to their fellows the benefits of the new way 
of living. From these groups flow out streams of 
influence that redeem the whole land in the course 
of time, and bring multitudes to accept the creed of 
civilization. 

To raise the standard of life among a people is 
civilization's finest achievement. It is one of the most 
patent of the results of the missionary propaganda. 
To add to the life of a whole nation by making the 
daily lives of all its people somewhat. more worth while, 
is, by that much, to bring nearer the Kingdom of 
Heaven. To level the inequalities even a little, and 
to bestow the gifts of mercy, justice, and humility 
upon the ideals of a nation, is to do the work of Him 
who came to make all men brethren. Christian mis- 
sions proceed by creating this man and that a new 
creature — not to save them out of the world, but 
within it and for its sake. They live the new and 
better way and a great multitude come to appreciate 
it. The passion of fellow-help is implanted, and each 
does something for the other. The leaven of human 
good is spread far and wide, the spirit of social service 
creates a new and better order of society, and the 
Christ, thus lifted up, draws all men unto himself. 

The figures that tell the number of converts, in- 
spiring as they are, tell but a part of the story of the 
boon of good the missionary evangel carries unto the 
uttermost parts of the earth. They are really but an 

24 



INTRODUCTION 

index to the mighty volume of good the missionary- 
is doing. "Teaching them to observe all things, 
whatsoever I have commanded you," he creates a new 
order of society. 

3. Christianity as the Universal Faith. 

All nations have possessed a national religion. 
Old Roman statesmen were personally filled with con- 
tempt for the gods, but held to them because they 
deemed them means of holding the people in reverence 
and an aid to order. They did not dream of a state 
without religion. Modern Japan illustrates the same 
national intuition. Shintoism is the religion of pa- 
triotism. The worship of the emperor comes down 
from primitive legends that trace the birth of the dy- 
nasty to the gods. Roman Christianity was thrust 
out of Japan because it was thought to be interfering 
with the emperor's divinity, and that its fealty to the 
pope would divide the loyalty of the people. Con- 
fucianism is Chinese. It is nationalistic in its claim 
to their fealty. The emperor is its supreme head. 
It has spread to other Mongolians as an ethical creed, 
but China has exalted Confucius to divine honors 
and requires all officers and all students at govern- 
mental schools to pay him religious reverence. Brah- 
manism is Hindu. It has never spread beyond the 
borders of India, and has no desire to do so. Buddhism 
has become largely Mongolian. Burmah and Ceylon 
are about the only non-Mongolian peoples who make 
it their faith. It was once a missionary faith and its 
early annals furnish heroic examples of missionary 
zeal, but it had not the vital social power to keep it 

25 



INTRODUCTION 

to the task. Its contact with Christianity has aroused 
a small revival among Japanese Buddhists, and they 
are adopting elements of the Christian gospel in an 
effort to overcome its inroads. It to-day has fewer 
adherents than has Protestantism, numbering, ac- 
cording to late authority, only 184,000,000, though 
it has been living 2,500 years amid great populations. 
Mohammedanism is essentially Arabic. It is a mis- 
sionary religion, but centers in Arabic nations and 
among the descendants of Arabs, and has ever been 
as much political as religious. The great Moslem 
population of India is traceable to the Arabic invasions 
of centuries ago, and its adherents are largely their 
descendants, mixed, it is true, with the less virile Hindu 
blood. The same is true of the faith of China. 

The missionary sterility of all these religions is due 
to a lack of social force. A faith spreads in the ratio 
that it gives men an interest in fellow-men, and in- 
spires them with the spirit of service. When a re- 
ligion is frankly nationalistic, there is no missionary 
appeal. Unless it puts great value upon life as such, 
and assesses the world in which we live at divine values, 
there will be little missionary enthusiasm. Con- 
fucianism makes every man sufficient unto himself. 
It allows concubinage, and thus the degradation of 
womankind. Slavery is practiced and suicide is very 
common. The criminal code of China has ever been 
barbarous, and there has never been either universal 
education or a charity worth the name. The great 
sage said, "Thou shalt love thy friend and ignore thy 
enemy," and added, "Have no friends not your equal." 
His version of the golden rule made it a negation. 

26 



INTRODUCTION 

The ethical code of Confucius is a great gain over 
that of nature religion or of Hinduism, but it lacks 
the propulsive power of faith in God and a universal 
interest in man. It ignores the Creator and teaches 
that the less said about him the better. Buddhism 
began in benevolence, but is to-day existing with no 
charity beyond the giving of small alms in order to ac- 
quire merit. Its monks are lazy and generally ig- 
norant, though among them are found some who are 
in earnest and seek the light. But Buddhism crushes 
desire as bad and turns its true disciples from the world 
as from a place of evil. It has made little real con- 
tribution to progress, and its hope for life is that it 
may end in extinction. Brahmanism is a caste re- 
ligion. That within itself is sufficient social condemna- 
tion. Mohammedanism has been the most virile of 
non-Christian missionary religions, but its propaganda 
has been by fire and sword and thus by anti-social 
force. It teaches polygamy and concubinage, and 
practices slavery. It makes of its followers a superior 
caste wherever they dwell, and comes to all other 
faiths with fierce intolerance. Its fatalistic theology 
must destroy its missionary force whenever it is sepa- 
rated from political aims, Its missionary crusades 
have ever been political and never humanitarian. 

Christianity is the great universal religion. It 
has been misused by half-converted adherents for 
every end that human desire might conceive. There 
are yet those among them who would make it racial, 
and deny that it has any efficacy among others than 
the whites. They have accepted it from Asia, and from 
alien hands, then deny that it is fit for either Asia or 

27 



INTRODUCTION 

aliens. It has proven what its founder intended it 
to be — the greatest social force in the world. It pro- 
claimed that life was valuable for its own sake. When 
Jesus asked, "Of how much more value is a man than 
a sheep?" he challenged the world's pagan view of the 
value of humanity. Man is never to be considered 
property nor made subservient to property rights. 
When he called the body the temple of the spirit, he 
laid a sacred value on the flesh and taught none to 
despise the world. His call to service was a heroic 
demand for complete self-forgetfulness, not to avoid 
the world and its frictions and temptations, but to 
grapple with evil boldly and valiantly to overcome 
it. When the Apostle Paul said there was neither 
Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female, in 
Christ, he propounded the essential democracy of 
Christianity; in the first he abolished all racial and 
nationalistic aversions; in the second he condemned 
all class distinctions ; in the third he raised woman to a 
level with man and destroyed the age long, universal, 
anti-social, discrimination against her. Christianity 
is a dynamic of all just action. The institutions of 
civilization are its enginery, but its religion is its dy- 
namic, its propelling force. Gov. Woodrow Wilson 
defines Christianity as the center of education, phi- 
lanthropy, science, politics, philosophy, and, "in 
short, the center of all sentient and thinking life." 
The manner in which it makes good in its mis- 
sionary propaganda is twofold ; it wins great numbers of 
individuals and creates them social factors for the up- 
lift of their kind; and it leavens the social and moral 
life of whole populations that it has not yet won to 

28 



INTRODUCTION 

membership in its churches. As illustration of this 
latter, Japan furnishes a brilliant example. A Japa- 
nese Buddhist, a physician, says, " Christian morals 
have won in Japan." Dr. Nitobe, author of Bushido, 
says, " Christianity alone is powerful enough to over- 
come the materialism and utilitarianism of Japan." 
A Japanese Buddhist priest said, "Christian ethics 
are the best in the world." A Buddhist professor 
of ethics says, " Japan must accept Christian ethics." 
Professor Murakami, Japan's greatest Buddhist scholar, 
acknowledges the moral superiority of Christianity. 
Baron Mayajima says: "No matter how large our 
army and our navy, if we do not build upon righteous- 
ness we shall fail. The religion of Christ is the one 
most full of strength for the nation and for the indi- 
vidual." Prince Ito, within the last few years, said: 
"The only true civilization rests on Christian prin- 
ciples. The young men who receive Christian educa- 
tion will be the main factors in the future development 
of Japan." Count Okuma said to a body of young 
Christians, "Live and preach this (the Christian life), 
and you will supply just what the nation most needs at 
this juncture." The Japanese Minister of Education 
recommended the New Testament as the first book 
for all young men to read. A volume of such state- 
ments might be compiled from the leading minds of 
all lands. The religion of the Nazarene knows no 
national lines; its principles are universal, they touch 
all humanity where it is at one, and in time will lift 
all humanity to that oneness which will banish "man's 
inhumanity to man," for "the spirit of Christ is the 
spirit of Humanity." It binds to no dead past, as 

29 



INTRODUCTION 

does Confucianism, but builds solidly upon the past; 
it forgets not the world to find God, as does Brahman- 
ism, but finds God in his world; it loses not God to 
find the good of mortal life, as does Buddhism, but 
gauges the good of mortal life by his divine life ; it con- 
quers not by a sword of blood, as does Mohammedan- 
ism, but by the sword of the Spirit and the bonds of 
peace. It would make all men brethren, still all hate, 
break down all sectism and class discord, and rule 
the world through the constructive power of a univer- 
sal love. 

Religion is the mightiest of all forces resident in 
humanity. Men die for their faith when they would 
for nothing else, and their lives are controlled by it 
against all the powers of being. "Man is incurably 
religious," said Paul Sabbatier. Spencer failed ut- 
terly to find the non-religious man his theories hy- 
pothecated, and Ratzel, in his "History of Mankind," 
affirms that there is no such thing as a non-religious 
human being. Even the skeptical, in their very 
aversion to religion, display "incurably religious" 
interests. Christianity rises to its highest in its hold 
upon the fealty of its followers. Moslems may die 
in fanatical zeal, but "the power of the love of Christ 
has been displayed alike in the most heroic pages of 
Christian martyrdom, in the most pathetic pages of 
Christian resignation, in the tenderest pages of Chris- 
tian charity," says Lecky. The power of Christian- 
ity as a civilizing force is manifesting itself in these 
latter days as never before, because its followers are 
moved to-day with a better understanding of the 
genius of their faith. Their conquest is by the subtle 

30 



INTRODUCTION 

art of persuasion. That art has ever been like the 
warming rays of the sunshine in its power to fructify 
life. Like the acorn that bursts the rock, Christian 
lives rend the Gibraltars of heathenism. ^Esop's 
fable told how the sun took the coat off the traveler's 
back when the violence of the wind only made him 
hold it the more closely. "The Apostle Paul's jour- 
neys outrivaled in significance to civilization the con- 
quests of Alexander and Caesar," says Prof. William 
Ramsey. "The missionary has done more for the 
Levant than all the nations of the earth together, " 
said Gladstone. "Bulgaria would never have gained 
her independence had it not been for Roberts Col- 
lege," mourned the late Sultan Abdul Hamid. "Not 
England, but Jesus Christ is redeeming India," says 
Sir Andrew Frasier, for thirty years an administrator 
in India. "England has sent out a tremendous moral 
force in the life and character of that mighty prophet 
to conquer and hold this vast empire. None but 
Jesus, none but Jesus, ever deserved this bright, this 
precious diadem, and Jesus shall have it," cried Keshub 
Chunder Sen, founder of the Brahmo Somaj, in an 
eloquent peroration to an address he delivered in Cal- 
cutta. Religion is the mightiest social power resident 
in humanity, and the Christian religion is the mightiest 
power for the constructive uplift of mankind that has 
ever entered the world. 



31 



CHAPTER I 

Things Figures Can Not Tell 

1. By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them. 

" History is no sphinx." Wendell Philipps asked 
students of comparative civilization to allow China 
to speak for Confucianism, Japan for Buddhism, India 
for Brahmanism, Turkey for Mohammedanism, and 
America for Christianity. 

The final test of a culture, a civilization, or a re- 
ligion is the progress it creates. Every great religion 
produces a civilization, and every civilization has a 
religion at its core. Christianity creates personality; 
it appeals to the individual ; then it socializes him. 
Christian personality is not measured in terms of 
selfish self, but in the terms of unselfish self. It vaunts 
not itself, is not puffed up, seeketh not its own. The 
greatest personality is that which most adequately 
sees the viewpoint of all its fellows and most ardently 
sympathizes with all mankind, and then adds a mastery 
of those events that may be ordered for the common 
welfare of all. 

11 Religion works most fruitfully through the social 
organism," said Dr. Storrs. It makes good in social 
terms. History reveals that it is not in material 
things, but in moral character and social good that 
civilization finds its guarantee of stability. Good 

3 33 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

becomes the "goods" of civilization. Economics are 
selfish. Property rights, when made the paramount 
consideration, bias the minds of men to things rather 
than to human good; competitor is arrayed against 
competitor, class against class, and nation against 
nation. Human welfare demands co-operation. Chris- 
tianity creates high social ideals and gives men the 
will to realize them. A religion is powerful to the 
extent that it interests men in men, and gives them 
the working means of advancing the welfare of their 
kind. 

Christianity courts the tests of comparison as a 
ministrant of social good and an inspirer of social 
progress. Lowell defied the skeptics "to point to 
any spot ten miles square, where a decent man could 
live in decency, supporting and educating his children, 
where age is reverenced, infancy protected, manhood re- 
spected, womanhood honored, and human life held 
in due regard, where the gospel of Christ has not gone 
and cleared the way and made decency and society 
respectable." Frederic Dennison Maurice said, "Ev- 
ery one is sensible of a change in the whole climate of 
thought and feeling the moment he crosses the boundary 
which divides Christianity from Heathendom." Chris- 
tianity alone is flexible enough to meet the demands 
made by human progress. It creates in man a de- 
sire for better things, and gives him the open mind 
and makes him a "seeker after truth," promising that 
in that truth he shall find the freedom that all souls 
seek. Not all Christians keep the open mind, but they 
do keep it in just so far as they are Christians. And 
it is not merely a wearing of the name Christian, nor 

34 






Kfc|ry%ffiinif ** 'tc rmr ■ a**^. .,,,.;«... . 


'"""! 











Id Examination Stalls at Nankin, China. Modern _ Civil 
Service is now replacing the old-time examination in 
Classics. 




A 



Modern School on the site of the Old Examination Stalls 
at Chentu, West China. This illustrates the New Era 
in China. 



THINGS FIGURES CAN NOT TELL 

the fact that one has appropriated part of the benefits 
of Christianity that gives the world a helper. Open- 
mindedness and truth seeking are necessary conditions 
of Christian progress. 

Paganism is static; its Golden Ages are in the past. 
Christianity puts its Golden Age in the future. The 
Kingdom of God has not yet reached its consummation, 
it is to come. Pagan religions give men the backward 
look. Christianity gives them the forward look. 
Men are optimistic because they believe their age 
has made progress over previous ages. Paganism is 
pessimistic because it believes the present is worse 
than the past, and therefore the future will perhaps 
be yet worse. Paganism hopes to escape this world, 
to retire into oblivion, or to be rescued into a better 
place. Some Christians have adulterated their re- 
ligious doctrines with these ideas, but at the heart of 
Christendom has ever been found a saving faith in the 
promises of Scripture for a "new heaven and new 
earth." 

China is the answer to Confucianism. Confucius 
pretended to give nothing new; he pointed back to the 
sages that were old, even in his time. He gave China 
the finest ethical code found outside the Christian 
Scriptures. But the Celestial Empire has made no 
progress in a millennium. Hers has been the back- 
ward look. She worships her ancestors. All things 
were done as the fathers did them. The ethical code 
of Confucius's five relations lifted her as high as eth- 
ical precept could lift a great people. Then, notwith- 
standing the fact that the Chinese are among the most 
virile, industrious, intellectual, and peaceable of 

35 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

peoples, China crystalized and progress ceased. The 
ethics of Confucius is negative. It lacks a propulsive 
power for social good. Confucianism solidifies, Chris- 
tianity fructifies. 

Japan is the answer to Buddhism. The religion of 
Gautama is the most spiritual outside of Christianity. 
The great Buddha was himself one of the first of 
saints. Yet to-day Buddhism is represented by a 
priesthood whose character is, to say the least, not 
synonymous with charity or virtue, and with a worship 
that does not imply any fundamental social obligation. 
Christianity has brought more progress to Japan in 
fifty years than Buddhism brought in five hundred 
years. "Buddhism is a personal philosophy rather 
than a social power," says Dr. Carver. Japan's 
social life remained licentious, her daughters were sold 
into shame, woman was not a companion to her hus- 
band, and despotism ruled in all her life, from the 
family to the throne. It was not until Christian 
ideals entered Japan and she opened her eyes to the 
arts and powers of Christian progress, that she threw 
off the provincial customs of ages and entered the list 
of modern nations. 

India is the answer to Brahmanism. A Greek 
traveler and historian of twenty-five hundred years 
ago draws a picture of Hindu social life that agrees 
with their own traditions of better days in the past. 
According to his account there was then no caste, 
and the customs were less cruel than they were when 
the first missionaries arrived, two centuries ago. 
Buddhism came before that ancient date and sought 
to lift India out of a semi -animistic faith to a higher 

36 



THINGS FIGURES CAN NOT TELL 

realm of philosophy and of religious meditation. But 
Brahmanism overcame the purer teaching, and there 
is every evidence that it has been a degenerating, 
rather than a regenerating religion. Caste paralyzes 
all power for social progress, because there can be no 
real progress without the enlarging of democratic 
ideals and the realization of a larger amount of social 
equality. Woman is in a more abject state in India 
than in any land outside of savagery. Their worship 
is conducted with debasing practices and through 
forms that testify to degeneracy of ideals. India has 
kept no annals except such as her religious tradi- 
tions have preserved. Her dominating religion, which 
should have been her social force, has been more nearly 
anti-social. Instead of uniting the nation, it has tended 
to disintegrate it. It has had no positive evangel. 
It has been eclectic, and adopted and absorbed and 
then debased almost every better religion or philosophy 
proposed in that benighted land. If it was said of 
China that she was not a country but a race, it could 
be said of India that she was not even a race, but a 
heterogenous collection of peoples, fenced in by the 
giant Himalayas, curiously cultivating at one extreme 
a speculative metaphysic, and at the other slowly 
losing vitality through anti-social customs. 

Turkey is the answer to Mohammedanism. The 
faith of Islam was created out of a degenerate Judaism 
and some stray snatches of early Christianity, and 
then adapted to the life of Arabs. It took on the 
military spirit and became missionary through desire 
of conquest. It has a legalistic moral code, a sensual 
promise for the hereafter, a strong, prejudicial sect 

37 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

spirit, and an unelastic social ideal. It has no caste, 
but it is a caste within itself. Its legalism prevents 
it becoming a leaven for moral welfare, for legalism 
does not have power to create real character, not even 
a Christian legalism. It is fatalistic, and therefore 
deprived of the dynamics of progress, even though 
it had the moral power that high principles would give. 
The answer of history to Moslemism is the contradic- 
tion of a medieval nation in close contact with the 
world currents of progress, and yet denying ingress 
to their fructifying tides. Turkey is to-day ap- 
parently turning to modern ways, but she is doing 
so at the cost of her historic religious position. The 
Sheik-ul-Islam is repealing her sacred traditions and 
denuding her of her battle-cries, and proclaiming the 
hated " infidel " and "Christian dog" a brother. The 
young Turks are men who received their education 
in a Christian atmosphere. Christian missions set 
the models for Turkey's proposed school system, and 
cultivated the minds of so many of the youth that 
when rebellion broke over the ramparts of tyranny 
there were none to defend the old regime, and the land 
was leavened with enough of a citizenship to make 
a modern government an immediate and practicable 
reality. Islam created no school system, but it did 
create a harem. It brought no gospel of peace, but 
boldly practiced one of conversion or extermination. 
It did not open, but defiantly closed and prejudiced 
minds. It plead a form of equality for the "faithful" 
and thus improved Hinduism, but it plead for in- 
tolerance toward all not of its creed, and it evolved 
no system of benevolence, founded no real homes, 

38 



THINGS FIGURES CAN NOT TELL 

instilled no ideals of justice or mercy or a humble 
walk with God. Its social power is not more than 
equal to its inculcation of those practices which Chris- 
tianity teaches, and its denial of progress is to be dis- 
covered in those anti-social principles, through the 
practice of which it fails to reach up to the lofty ideals 
of Christianity. 

The world to which Jesus came was no more moral, 
democratic, human, or charitable than is that to which 
his gospel is carried to-day by the missionary. How 
do we account for the difference between that world 
and the one which professes Christianity to-day? 
Christian civilization alone, among the civilizations 
of the world, has made great progress and seems to 
be even yet only in the childhood of its growth. It is 
not yet perfected, but its glory is that it is ever going 
on toward perfection. A thing is to be judged, not 
by its immature attainments, but by the promise it 
gives of fruitage and by the fruit it has already borne. 
There are many good things in the pagan world and 
there are many bad in Christendom, but the com- 
parison is not in a confusing process of selecting the 
best and the worst, but in an averaging of the totals. 

Our modern Christian civilization testifies elo- 
quently to the success of Christianity as a civilizer. 
Our forefathers had been barbarians from time im- 
memorial until Christianity was brought to them. 
From that time the evolution of modern Anglo-Saxon 
and Teutonic civilization began. To challenge the 
missionary is to deny the very courses of history. 
We have not yet purged ourselves of all our pagan 
heritage. We have a great deal of baptized paganism 

39 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

in our churches. There is a great deal of counterfeit 
afloat, but its existence only evidences the value of 
the genuine. Christianity alone, among the great 
religions, has created benevolence and brotherly 
love and impressed them upon whole nations as ideals 
of life. It alone has created that type of personality 
which expresses itself in fellow-service. It alone ex- 
presses sacrifice in social terms, and makes religion 
a thing of service to fellow-man. It stands the test 
of the " average good." 

2. The Story of the Figures. 

Statistics are usually considered dry, but let it 
be a column of digits that sums up our profits or tells 
the totals of a fortune that has come to us, and we 
are aroused to a feverish enthusiasm. Figures that 
indicate a remarkable missionary advance ought to 
be very interesting to Christians, because they tell 
of new recruits to the cause, and much more, they 
tell of conquests that mean permanent territory added 
to Christian lands, and are eloquent with the romance 
of missionary adventure and the tragedy of mission- 
ary sacrifice. 

There are a few critics yet that scoff at the mission- 
ary enterprise, but their ignorance is so coming to 
shame them that their dolorous and caustic voices 
are not often heard. No one but an intellectual 
provincial, a moral agnostic, a medieval race-hater, 
or a dogmatic religious quack could be cynical about 
an enterprise that brings so much of human good and 
shows such an amazing success as does the missionary 
enterprise. Every present-day Christian people have 

40 



THINGS FIGURES CAN NOT TELL 

abandoned an ethnic faith to accept Christianity, 
and the marvelous success of this first century of 
modern missionary activity gives assurance that every 
people with an ethnic faith will ultimately abandon 
it in favor of Christianity. It was a Jew that brought 
the gospel to Rome, a Roman that took it to France, 
a Frenchman that took it to Scandinavia, a Scotchman 
that evangelized Ireland, and an Irishman that, in 
turn, made the missionary conquest of Scotland. No 
people have received Christianity except at the hands 
of an alien, and it is at the hands of aliens who have 
been bereft of provincial conceit and filled with Christ- 
like confidence in men, without regard to race, color, 
or kind, that it is being taken to practically every 
land under the sun to-day. There is a patriotism 
of the Kingdom of God, and a fealty to the interests 
of humanity that makes a man none the less loyal to 
his own people, but fills him with a larger love for all 
the world. 

The first million converts of the modern mission- 
ary era were won in one hundred years; the second 
million were added in twelve years, and the next mil- 
lion will be gained in six years. In China it took 
thirty-five years to win the first six, and at the end of 
fifty years there were less than a thousand who pro- 
fessed evangelical Christianity in that hoary old land ; 
but at the end of the second half-century there are 
a round quarter-million in the Protestant Christian 
community there, and the numbers have increased 
sevenfold in two decades. In India the increase has 
been even more gratifying. In the first of three de- 
cades it was 53%, in the second 61%, andin the third 

" 4 J " 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

86%. Twenty-five years ago Korea was closed land, 
but to-day there are more than 200,000 who are either 
already baptized or are under instruction in prepara- 
tion for that eulminative act of Christian allegiance, 
and the numbers are increasing at the rate of 30% 
annually. Livingstone found Africa a "Dark Conti- 
nent," but to-day the lights of a million lives shine 
around its shores and pierce into its interior. Whole 
nations, like Uganda, have been won from barbarism. 
In the South Seas the first band of heroic English 
missionaries were driven off the island of Tahiti only 
a little over a century ago. Up to the present that 
single little Christian island has sent 160 missionaries 
to the islands around about, and whole groups, like 
the Figis, have been Christianized. Uganda and the 
Figis, two of the darkest spots that civilization has 
ever entered, are to-day said to provide the largest 
percentage of regular church goers of any places in 
Christendom, and to be among the most peaceful 
lands known. In South India, the oldest of modern 
Protestant mission fields, and in one of the most diffi- 
cult countries, the cumulative effects of the work is 
telling mightily, and gives promise of a greatly ac- 
celerated increase in numbers as the evangel attains the 
momentum brought by further years of success. The 
United South India Church alone numbers nearly a 
quarter-million members, while in all South India 
there are a half-million communicants in the church, 
and half as many more belong to the Christian com- 
munity about the churches; in three years one Presby- 
terian mission has received no less than 3,000 converts. 
In Japan the numerical advance has been slower, but 

42 



THINGS FIGURES CAN NOT TELL 

the moral success has been out of all proportions to 
the numerical increase of the churches; there are only 
70,000 Protestant church members, but they are in- 
creasing at the rate of 10% per annum. They are of 
the more potential classes, and exercise an influence 
in society and in the state out of all proportion to their 
numbers. It is claimed that a million of the educated 
youth of Japan hold the New Testament as the one 
authoritative ethical code, and order their lives by it 
quite as well as a like number that might be se- 
lected from our churches at home. There is on the 
foreign field to-day a Christian community of more 
than 5,000,000 souls, about one-half of whom have 
been received into active membership of the churches. 
Ten years ago there were but 3,500,000, and fifteen 
years ago less than 3,000,000. At the present rate 
of increase there will be another million inside the next 
six years, and many now living will have their eyes 
gladdened by the sight of a million per year being 
added to the Christian host that is so rapidly arising 
in the regions beyond the seas. 

But, gratifying as the evangelistic statistics are, 
they do not tell all the story. Multitudes receive 
of the good the missionary offers that do not openly 
profess the creed he takes. There are 10,000 mission- 
ary homes, every one of which is a neighborhood 
center, doing, in a way, the work of a social settle- 
ment. There are 160 mission presses upon which 
there are printed 500 periodicals, besides tracts in- 
numerable and thousands of books. Through the 
diffusion of literature, knowledge on every theme 
that forms a part of modern knowledge is disseminated. 

43 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

Missionaries translate books of science, history, po- 
litical economy, sociology, and law. They acquaint 
the backward nations with the progress of civilization, 
and put in their hands the knowledge and art essential 
to attain it for themselves. They conduct 25,000 
schools and in them instruct more than 1,500,000 
pupils. The instruction reaches from the kinder- 
garten to the university and technical instruction. 
Through them they create a citizenship. In Japan 
the Doshisha alone has trained 6,000 native leaders 
for all walks of life. In Turkey instruction has been 
given to upwards of 40,000 annually, and when the 
new era came in a day there was a vast leaven of citizen- 
ship, instructed in modern learning, to hail the day 
with joy and to guide the uninstructed by the way 
of peace into better things. The missionary school 
became the harbinger of all the instruction modern 
India possesses, and set the model for both China and 
Japan. In the mission hospitals and dispensaries 
millions receive balm for their wounds and healing 
for their diseases, and, in the course of time, will 
bring to each nation a native medical profession, 
competent to care for its own ailments. A native 
ministry is being trained, and the mission church is 
more and more relying upon it. When there is a com- 
petent native leadership for the churches, there will 
be an advance such as no foreign leadership can ever 
hope to bring, for the people of every tongue listen 
most readily and follow most confidently their own 
leaders. An old society, like the London Missionary 
Society, illustrates the trend in this matter. With an 
income of a million a year, they employ but 295 mis- 

44 



THINGS FIGURES CAN NOT TELL 

sionaries, and have a staff of native workers number- 
ing 4,000 under their supervision. Their fields were 
among the first opened, and have been cultivated long 
enough to develop a native leadership. The Chris- 
tian communities under their care number 400,000 
souls, and their statesmanlike policy is an example 
to all younger mission boards. In the older South 
India fields there are 900 missionaries and 14,000 
native workers. Quite as promising as the develop- 
ment of a native leadership for the mission churches 
is the rapid increase in self-support. To make com- 
parison between the giving of mission churches and 
those at home, the basis must be not that of dollar 
with dollar, but that of earning capacity and the scale 
of wages. The 70,000 Christians in Japan gave 
$150,000 last year, and wages in Japan are but a frac- 
tion of what they are in the United States. A most 
conservative estimate would make that sum worth 
a million dollars in American earning power. The 
Korean churches pay 90% of their native ministry 
and build practically all their own chapels and school 
houses. The Ceylonese Christians give an average 
of 36 days' wages out of each year for each member. 
The Congregationalists are among the most liberal 
givers at home, their giving being 50% higher than 
the average for the home churches, and they give only 
an average of eight or nine days' wages apiece per year 
to all the work of the church, or one-fourth what the 
Ceylonese give. The African converts in the Bolenge 
field, on the Congo, give one-tenth of their income 
as a minimum and add to it one-tenth of their mem- 
bership as evangelists. In China the membership 

45 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

has increased eleven times in thirty years, and the 
ratio of native giving has increased thirty times. The 
Telugus and Tamils of South India earn from eight 
to twelve cents per day and give $120,000 per annum. 
In 1900 the native churches on all mission fields gave 
$1,833,961. In 1910 they gave $5,249,405. Their 
contributions were trebled in a decade. In the same 
decade the home churches increased their missionary 
gifts by 80%, or a little more than one-fourth as rapidly 
as the mission churches. The mission churches are 
missionary to the last degree. They are not smitten 
with the smug and selfish and wholly perverted idea 
that the gospel is for them, or that there is any pe- 
culiarity of kind that makes them its beneficiaries, 
and rules out others as unfit or undeserving or as suf- 
ficient unto themselves. It is sheer atheism to talk 
about Christianity for the West, and contend that 
each people evolves the religion that is best for it. 
The West did not evolve Christianity; it received it 
at the hand of missionaries from the East. 

The figures that tell of the awakened interest of 
the church at home are also inspiring. The Protestant 
Reformation began with an avowed hostility to mis- 
sionary work. It has been only a century and a half 
since the first beacon light was sent to a foreign field, 
and for the first one hundred years little was done. 
We are now at the dawn of the missionary era. The 
church is awakened at last, and the interest of the 
past decade is eloquent with prophecy for the future. 
The total support has grown from $17,315,526 in 
1900, to $32,139,509 in 1910, or an increase of almost 
100%. The Laymen's Missionary Movement is es- 

46 



THINGS FIGURES CAN. NOT TELL 

sentially a pocket-book movement; it is an awakening 
of incomes to a responsibility of stewardship. The 
class that holds the purse strings are discovering in 
the mission fields spheres for investment that pay 
as do no others. The campaign was inaugurated in 
Toronto in 1908; that city's gift increased from $175,- 
000 to $363,000 the first year, and went up to $411,000 
the second. It is a fair index of the generosity the 
Movement is to bring, it means the most adequate 
financing of opportunities offered in the field that 
has ever been realized. The number of missionaries 
has increased by one-third in the decade, and the 
number of employed native workers by one-half. 
The missionary host is increasing at the rate of 3% 
per annum, but the opportunities are increasing at 
double that ratio. In the past four years the Student 
Volunteer Movement has furnished 1,275 new mis- 
sioned, and has some 6,000 recruits preparing in the 
various colleges for future enlistment. Their in- 
crease over the past quadrennium was 27%, and was 
64% over the one before the last. The church at 
home is awakening, but she is yet bestowing $12 per 
member upon herself each year, while sending only 
40 cents to the mission field. She supports one minis- 
ter for every 140 members at home, and wastes vast 
sums upon denominational enterprises that duplicate 
the Christian efforts of sister churches. She supports 
an ordained worker for every 400 people in the home 
field, and supplies one for every 200,000 in the lands 
that have no churches, schools, books, hospitals, or 
Christian homes, nor the mighty influence of Chris- 
tian civilization. To-day there are on the field 21,248 

47 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

missionaries and 91,513 native helpers, or a total mis- 
sionary host of 113,207; ten years ago there were 91,899. 
To-day there are 45,540 places of work; ten years 
ago there were 28,135. If the whole church could be 
endued with the spirit of the Moravians, the task 
would be undertaken in a manner that would need 
no apologies. This little denomination of 30,000 
Christians is to-day supporting over 400 missionaries, 
or one to every 68 members. The entire American 
church supports but one missionary to every 2,500 
church members. The Moravians are giving $400,000 
annually to support their mission churches, or $13 
per caput for their membership. If all the churches 
did as well, the world would be evangelized in this 
generation. They have been the pioneers in most 
of the fields and have often turned over established 
stations to those who came after them. They have 
100,000 gathered into their mission churches, and 
are pushing forward into unoccupied fields with true 
Apostolic zeal. 

Here in the brilliantly illuminated civilization of 
a Christian land we are asking the men on the out- 
posts, " Watchmen, what of the night?" Truly does 
the answer echo, "The morning cometh." Never 
since the dawn of civilization have the signs of its 
coming given such assurance. But figures do not 
adequately tell the story; they are but indexes to the 
larger volume of missionary accomplishment. Where 
thousands accept the definite evangel of the missioner, 
tens of thousands receive the benefits of his new truth 
and the better way of life. While a native church 
is being established, a whole nation is being leavened 

48 



THINGS FIGURES CAN NOT TELL 

with a higher ideal and the old is giving way to the 
new. The missionary is the pioneer of a new epoch in 
the life of every people to whom he goes. In the West 
we are not all Christians, but we all live in Christian 
lands. So in the East, and in the savage lands, the 
missionary is bringing that social uplift that trans- 
forms custom and elevates whole nations and changes 
the face of the earth. 

3. The Leaven in the Lump. 

Christianity is taking the world "because it meets 
and supplies the deepest wants of men more perfectly 
than any other religion meets and supplies them," 
says Dr. Gladden. It is not claimed that Christ is 
the sole cause of progress, but that in his gospel and 
life are the most powerful factors that make for prog- 
ress. John Fiske said that "religion is the largest 
and most ubiquitous fact connected with the existence 
of mankind upon the earth." "Pagan religion stopped 
the hand and neglected the heart," said Montesquiue. 
The Christian religion begins with the heart, and, 
placing there the motive power of action, sets the hand 
to every task that will redound to human welfare. 
Other systems may give ethical codes, but they bind 
them about the minds of men with a restricting literal- 
ism, while Christianity plants the seeds of principle 
in the hearts of men and leaves life to develop according 
to any variation that race, clime, or custom may de- 
mand. Judaism and Confucianism gave the Golden 
Rule negatively; they asked men to refrain from evil. 
But Christ gave it positively; he asked men to prosecute 
the doing of good. Between the two modes of action 

4 49 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

there is a continent of indifference. The one does 
no harm for self's sake; the other does good for other's 
sake. 

Emerson said that the character of people was de- 
termined by their conception of God. Buddhism 
worships the perfected man. Gautauma taught that 
there was nothing better to worship. He spent his 
life thinking through the problems of suffering and 
death. He forsook wife and child to lead an ascetic 
life, and to find the way of escape from the miseries 
of existence. His disciples practice charity for merit's 
sake, but the world is not good and God is not in- 
terested in a perfected social relationship. The end 
of the best life is either absorption of one's personality 
into Nirvana, or complete oblivion. Self-annihila- 
tion is not a social ideal. The extinction of desire is 
the supreme moral end of life to the faithful Buddhist. 

Confucius taught that men should "respect the 
gods, but let them alone." Confucianism really has 
no personal God. Its disciples leave the worship 
of "Shangte" to the emperor. Most of them accept 
the spirit worship of Taoism and make obiesence to 
the tablets of their ancestors. Man has a duty to 
fellow-man, but it does not hinge upon his conception 
of God, and therefore lacks'" the moral sanction that 
Christian theism gives. Brahmanism has many gods. 
It boasts of a pantheon of 330,000,000 divinities. Its 
great deities are anything but moral examples. They 
are really incarnations of human desires; in them is 
found the entire gamut of human passions. Salvation 
is not through fellow-help nor love of one's kind. Their 
best sacred book, the Bhagavad Gita, teaches that 

50 



THINGS FIGURES CAN NOT TELL 

even the evil person who worships correctly is deemed 
good. This illustrates the morals of the system. 
Mohammedanism teaches there is "one God and Mo- 
hammed is his prophet." It is not only monotheistic, 
it is iconoclastic. The future is fixed; law is supreme; 
none but Moslems can be saved. Mercy is not a 
tenet of Islamism. "After twelve centuries the Arabs 
are a nation of robbers, " says Professor Marshall. It 
is no part of man to create a better order, God has 
fixed everything from the beginning. 

None of these religions teach any such thing as a 
Kingdom of God. That which is the social inspiration 
and goal of Christianity is either denied or omitted 
by all of them. Their gods are either aloof, or non- 
existent, or implacable, or else they are interested only 
in a personal salvation. The world is either totally 
bad, is growing worse, or is a "wheel" upon which 
man is broken. It is never conceived of as a place 
into which "the heavens shall descend," and there 
"shall be a new heaven and a new earth." "One who 
has not examined the other religions can not know what 
Christianity really is," said Max Muller. Christian- 
ity is "the social hope of the nations," as Dr. Dennis 
demonstrates in his monumental work entitled, "Chris- 
tian Missions and Social Progress." 

If, as Fichte said, religion "seeks the realization of 
universal reason," may we not say that its end is the 
highest good of all? Benjamin Kidd, in his "Social 
Evolution," defines the scope of religion as being the 
subordination of the personal interests of the indi- 
vidual to the social organism, and says each type of 
civilization receives its characteristics from the ethical 

51 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

system implanted in it. According to his interpreta- 
tion of history, not economics, nor politics, nor racial 
types, nor any other single thing determines the evo- 
lution of progress, but amid them all religion is the 
most powerful factor. It strikes deepest into human 
motives, and though it be inscrutable to those who 
profess it, it nevertheless furnishes the chief sanctions 
for action. 

Christianity is neither a system of doctrine nor 
of morals, though it furnishes the world with both. 
Its dynamic is in a person. Christ said he was "the 
way, the truth, and the life," and "I came to bring 
life and bring it more abundantly. " He asked the 
world to learn of him, but it was not in knowledge, 
but in doing that it was to find life. Christ exists 
to-day in millions of hearts, not merely as a philosopher 
or a lawgiver nor even as a saint, but as a friend and 
helper, the most vital reality in experience. No other 
religion offers the dynamic of such a personality. 
" Social efficiency rests upon qualities of character." 
If, as Kidd says, "the one essential" is supernatural 
sanction of some kind for acts and observances which 
have a social significance, then Christianity's secret 
as the greatest social leaven in the lump of the world 
is explained by the character of its founder and the 
mystery of his abiding presence in the hearts of his 
followers. His was "the mightiest heart that ever 
beat — stirred by the Spirit of God; how it wrought in 
his bosom," said Theodore Parker. In his life men 
find that ideal which the minds of the greatest have 
ever sought in vain in their visions. In his promises 
they discover principles of action that "decide ques- 

52 



THINGS FIGURES CAN NOT TELL 

tions we scarcely dare agitate as yet." In his love 
they discover the most indefinable mystery that even 
religion has to offer. Other religions have their 
martyrs, men who died rather than surrender their 
faith, but what other religion sends men gladly to a 
living martyrdom that they may give self for the sake 
of others? Here is the social power of Christ's re- 
ligion, his "throne is a cross," his inspiration is that 
of human service, his way of life is through good to 
others. "The power of the love of Christ has been 
displayed alike in the most heroic pages of Christian 
martyrdom, in the most pathetic pages of Christian 
resignation, in the tenderest pages of Christian charity," 
says Lecky. "If the life and death of Socrates were 
those of a philosopher, the life and death of Jesus were 
those of a God," said Rousseau. 

The reproach of Christ was the source of his power. 
"He emptied himself, taking the form of a servant." 
So his disciples were exhorted by Paul, in his letter 
to the Philippians, to be of the same mind, and in 
lowliness, each counting other better than himself, 
think of the things of others as their own. It has 
been the inner circle of the faithful that has given the 
world its Christian civilization. The virtues they 
display are those we turn to for the explanation of all 
that is best in our civilization. Christian sacrifice 
is not for personal escape of penalty, but for the help 
of the "least of these." If it be said that "salvation 
is character," it can, too, be said that sacrifice is service. 
The Emperor Julian reproached Christianity for its 
doctrine of the equality of man. By that doctrine it 
has overthrown despotisms and destroyed feudalisms 

53 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

and created democracies. Lucian ridiculed it for 
brother love and especially love of slaves, "whom the 
gods ignored as men of inferior nature." But that 
brother love has lifted up the fallen and made the very 
salt of society. Through it slavery has been over- 
thrown and millions redeemed from bondage. By it 
the teaching of Plato and Aristotle that the masses 
can be but hewers of wood and drawers of water, and 
therefore have no place but to serve the elect of the 
race, has been supplanted by making of them citizens 
in their own right and by giving the government of 
nations to their will. Celsus satirized it for its message 
to the poor and weak and sinful. But Gibbon said, 
that while the empire deteriorated in luxury, a pure 
and humble religion gently insinuated itself into the 
minds of men, grew up in obscurity, derived new vigor 
from opposition, and finally planted its banner of the 
cross on the ruins of the capitol. The dispossessed 
are made the redeemed, the humble are exalted into 
greatness, the poor become rich in those things that 
do not destroy character. As egoism, privilege, and 
luxury ruin a people, Christianity saves through the 
implanting of unselfishness, charity, and humility. 

"It was reserved for Christianity to present to 
the world an ideal character, which through all the 
changes of eighteen centuries has inspired the hearts 
of men with an impassioned love, has shown itself 
capable of acting upon all ages, nations, temperaments, 
conditions, has been not only the highest pattern 
of virtue but the strongest incentive to practice, and 
has exercised so deep an influence that it may be truly 
said that the simple record of three short years of active 

54 



THINGS FIGURES CAN NOT TELL 

life has done more to regenerate and soften mankind 
than all the disquisitions of philosophers and all the 
exhortations of moralists," says Lecky, in his "His- 
tory of European Morals." 

It is this same religion that, in its purity and gentle- 
ness, is insinuating itself into the arrested life of archaic 
nations, planting itself in the unleavened mass of 
heathen races, bringing to them a light in learning, 
and giving them that mightiest of all civilizing agencies, 
the consecrated personalities of men devoted to their 
welfare. "Subtract the Christian personalities and 
the ideas that reigned in and lived through them, and 
you have but the struggle of brutal passions, of men 
savage through ambition and lust of power," says 
Dr. Fairbairn. 

Civilization is awakening to the fact that "there is 
also a missionary interpretation of history." Carlyle 
believed that progress came through the leadership 
of "heroes" and by "hero worship." A more modern 
theory is that it comes through the leavening per- 
sonalities and combined activities of groups of men 
devoted to a common idea. The missionary goes as 
the emissary of a new and better day. He alone 
of all the men who reside in foreign lands is there for 
an utterly unselfish purpose. He alone of all classes 
of men who mingle with alien peoples believes in their 
potentialities, and has supreme confidence that what 
has made him an enlightened being can make every 
other man the same. He has nothing to ask but a 
chance to be understood and an opportunity to apply 
his gospel. He is never defeated, for if he dies there 
are always ten to ask for his place. His sufferings 

55 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

are turned into balms of blessing for the children of his 
tormentors, and, if he is martyred, his "blood becomes 
the seed of the church-." He is the "pioneer in every 
reform, whether it be religious, social, or moral," said 
Tahil Ram Gunga Ram, a Hindu scholar. All are 
impressed by "the nobility of spirit, the simplicity of 
life, and the single-minded devotion to high aim," 
claimed for him by Sir Chas. A. Elliott, Lieut.-Governor 
of Bengal. He is a "worker together with God," and 
"fills up in his own body what lacks of the sufferings of 
Christ," that by his sacrifice he may communicate 
the sacrifice of Christ. There are many testimonies 
to his efficiency in the work he goes to do. Two will 
be given here. One is taken from the Japanese Mail, 
a secular paper, edited by non-Christians, and quoted 
by Dr. Dennis. "They lead the most exemplary 
lives ; devote themselves to deeds of charity ; place their 
educational and medical skill at the free disposal of 
the people, and exhibit in the midst of sharp suffering 
and diversity a spirit of patience and benevolence 
such as ought to enlist universal sympathy and re- 
spect." The other is from the words of Sir Harry H. 
Johnstone, British High Commissioner to East Central 
Africa, and a man who has spent many years in mission 
lands. He says, "They have done more good than 
armies, navies, and treaties have yet done." 

4. Time and the Tides. 

Customs change slowly. Nations and civilizations 
are not made in a day. The Kingdom of God cometh 
without observation. It is first the blade, then the 
ear, and then the full corn in the ear. Progress pro- 

56 



THINGS FIGURES CAN NOT TELL 

duces its cataclysms, but its great eras are not produced 
by cataclysms. The progress of Christian civiliza- 
tion is that of the leaven in the lump. There is much 
yet to be leavened. It is, indeed, one of the supreme 
obligations of the church to create social justice at 
home that she may the better deal with the social 
problems she is creating in the rejuvenation of the 
peoples of the earth. We are not yet purged of all 
our paganism; when we are the millennium will have 
come. Our confidence is in the comparison we can 
make with the social conditions that Christ found 
in the world, and those that the missionary finds 
where Christ is not known. What the missionary 
finds is a challenge to us to give what we have received 
in the faith that what has been done for us will, by the 
same power, be done for them. 

The Roman historian, Tacitus, tells the story of 
our pagan ancestors in the forests of the Rhine. They 
had reached about the same status as had the American 
Indian found by the white man in this country. They 
were a barbarous folk, dressing in skins and dwelling 
in caves and in tents of hide. The men fought and 
followed the chase, and the women cultivated rude 
plots of ground. They were straight, ruddy of com- 
plexion, blonde haired, deep chested, and vigorous. 
They ate raw meat, and, in times of great victory, 
drank from the skulls of their vanquished foes. If 
they wanted a bird to eat, they selected a smooth 
stone from the brook, and, with the unerring aim of 
savage arms, skilled in all the arts of the chase, brought 
him down from his perch in the trees. If they wanted 
fish, they either trapped it with their hands or hooked 

57 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

it with the breastbone of a small bird. If they ran 
across a bear they surrounded him, as the Africans do 
the hippopotami, and beat him to death with their 
clubs. The Prussians of North Germany and the 
Druids of England made human sacrifices, and it is 
probable that all the tribes north of the Alps did so 
until centuries after the beginning of the Christian 
era. 

Culture failed to make Grecian civilization per- 
manent. There lived at one time in Athens, then a 
city of less than ten thousand, no fewer than eighty- 
four men whose names are known until this day. 
Greek sculpture and Greek physic have never been 
surpassed, and Greek philosophy is still mediating 
the speculations of thinkers; but Greek civilization 
failed. It did not have the saving salt of social right- 
eousness. Its democracy even was that of an aris- 
tocracy, while the masses were but servants of the elect. 
The famed Roman Republic went down upon the bar 
of patricianism. No civilization will endure if it 
sets itself to cultivate a privileged few. Its only 
surety of permanence is in the steady progress of its 
powers in creating a democracy. Roman power be- 
came the power of the select and privileged; social 
justice was not created; there was no equality of man 
and no enthusiasm for humanity. The emperor be- 
came the state. Stoic jurisprudence did much to 
evolve a technical justice, but it never recognized 
essential human equality; it never gave the slave 
human rights, and it never elevated woman to the 
plane of man before the law. The voice of the people 
never became the voice of God in imperial Rome. 

58 



THINGS FIGURES CAN NOT TELL 

Individual rights were suborned in favor of patrician 
privilege, and the state came to be administered for 
the benefit of the rulers. Material power became 
regnant — a sure sign of inner decay — and luxury- 
brought dissipations that ruined the favored, while 
poverty brought weakness and immorality to the 
masses and thus undermined the foundations of so- 
ciety. 

The social status of the society to which Paul took 
Christianity is indicated by the patriarchal state of 
the family. The father and husband was supreme. 
The wife was under "tutelage," i. e., she was a minor 
before the law. If she brought a dowery, it passed 
from her control to that of her husband ; her inheritance 
was only equal to that of one of the children. She 
had no legal rights over her offspring. She was an 
inferior being and her husband's rights were despotic. 
Children had no rights; they were the property of 
their father; he could expose them to death if not 
wanted at birth, or he could sell them to whomsoever 
he wished. The Lactrian columns in the midst of 
the city of Rome were the appointed place to which 
little ones could be brought and left to the tender 
mercies of the slaver, or of the man who wished a 
servant. Whosoever desired could take away the 
little body that parental obligation refused to consider, 
and for whom there was no parental love, unless per- 
haps it was that of a mother who dared not oppose 
her husband's determination to put it away. There 
were few mercies for the weak, the poverty-stricken 
starved without public relief, and the unfortunate 
bore their own burdens or died under them. Work was 

59 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

not respected. Labor had no dignity. It has little 
enough yet, but it is at least respectable, and has the 
right to its own body and to bargain for its own wage. 

In the Roman Empire there were 60,000,000 
slaves at the time of Christ. In Athens there were 
but 21,000 freemen when the population was 200,000. 
In Attica, the seat of culture, three out of every four 
were bondsmen. Plato made the majority of men 
slaves in his ideal republic. Aristotle condemned 
the majority to become hewers of wood and drawers 
of water, and had no faith that human nature could 
ever make them worthy of aught else. Cato allowed 
old and sick slaves to be disposed of as a burden. 
Cassius defended the law in a case where, according 
to law, 600 were executed because one had killed 
their master. Seneca says Pollio mutilated slaves 
in anger and fed their flesh to the fishes. Juvenal 
asked, "How can a slave be a man?" Ulpian speaks 
of "a slave or any other animal." Seneca said, "A 
slave has no home or religion." Stoical jurists ruled 
that they were property the same as animals. They 
could be attached for debt, their testimony was ad- 
missible only under torture, and marriage was never 
legalized for them. Their first gleam of hope came 
when Constantine's code began to implant the rudi- 
ments of the Christian ideals of humanity. 

Paganism is egoistic, proud, and selfish. It seeks 
every one his own and might makes right. Chris- 
tianity is altruistic and implants a fundamental re- 
spect for the things of the other man. Harnack says 
it was the moral power of Christianity that maintained 
it during the early centuries of persecution and finally 

60 



THINGS FIGURES CAN NOT TELL 

carried the world for it. Greece and Rome were 
starkly individualistic. The church became popular 
and bargained with paganism. The pure faith was 
adulterated with heathen custom, and for a thousand 
years Christianity was shorn of her pristine moral 
power; but she never lost it, and during even the " Dark 
Ages" the leaven was working. Whatever the custom, 
it will be found that there was a protest somewhere 
among the prophetic souls who had not lost the vision, 
and that their light was as a pillar by night, guiding 
the courses of history. 

Ulfilas crossed the Alps with the gospel in the 
year 344 A. D. He had been captured in one of the 
northern raids of the Emperor of the Eastern Empire 
and his ruddy vigor, fighting powers, and handsome 
countenance won him imperial favor. He was edu- 
cated and was offered a place at the court, but he had 
attended the churches in Constantinople and learned 
the gospel of peace, and he longed to herald its message 
to his barbarous countrymen. He left court and civili- 
zation behind him and made his way alone to native 
land, with the sacred Scriptures as his choicest weapon. 
He translated the Bible into his native Gothic tongue, 
after having reduced it to writing. A single illumi- 
nated copy of his translation is yet held as an invaluable 
heirloom of Western civilization, and is preserved 
in the University of Upsala, in Sweden. In it our 
pagan forbears found the chart that led them into 
civilization. They were not transformed in a day; 
it took a thousand years to redeem them, and even 
then they had only purged out the grosser habits of 
barbarism; and it has taken another half millennium 

61 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

to bring the refinements of our modern life. It is the 
law of the leaven. 

In the year 208 A. D., Tertullian wrote that "places 
in Britain not yet visited by the Roman are subject 
to Christ." In 314, British delegates are found at 
the Council of Aries. St. Patrick's work in Ireland 
was done during the first half of the fifth century. 
It was a century later before the gospel really obtained 
a hold in Scotland, through the work of Columba, 
Not until the year 700 A. D. could the British Isles be 
called in any sense Christian ; it had taken five hundred 
years to make them so. Ireland became a missionary 
recruiting ground and "the greenest spot in Christen- 
dom." From her training schools and evangelical 
activities flowed out beneficent streams of missionary 
activity to Friesland and Germany. Willibrord pio- 
neered on the mouth of the Rhine in the year 690 A. D. 
The Prussians were still killing their deformed children 
and their aged, and burying wives and slaves with 
their deceased lords. The Saxons were still sea-rovers 
and pirates. So savage were the North Germans, that 
for two centuries, between the years 1000 and 1200 
A. D., none dared go to them. It was not until 1209 
that a missionary, named Christian, succeeded in ob- 
taining residence among them, and it was a thousand 
years from the days of Ulfilas before the gospel was 
recognized over all Western Europe. The hardy 
Norsemen were among the rudest and wildest of the 
Teutons. Willibrord went to them at the close of the 
seventh century, but was repulsed, and it was not 
until the year 827 A. D. that Ansgar began the work 
that finally prevailed. It took two hundred years to 

62 




A Native Church in the Marshall Islands, South Pacific Seas. 
-**• Illustrating native carving and building under missionary 



instruction. 




0* 



cers of a Native Church in Marshall Islands. These 
people were naked cannibals a generation ago. 



THINGS FIGURES CAN NOT TELL 

make Denmark Christian, and the island of Borneholm 
did not surrender until 1060. Sweden held out for an- 
other one hundred years, and Lapland did not yield 
until late in the thirteenth century. 

If it took a thousand years to convert modern 
Europe, shall we not marvel at the progress made in 
a single century in an arrested civilization like that 
of China, or in that of a century and a half in an ancient 
and debilitated nation like India, or in the half century's 
attainments in proud Japan? These nations have 
the conservatism that ccmes with ancient custom 
and a static half-civilization. Christianity comes 
to them with the impact of its Western attainments; 
it is borne on the wings of inventions, and brings a 
world of progress that commends its message in a 
thousand ways. It has obtained a vast momentum 
in the world, and by that law it will overcome more 
quickly in the East than it did in the West. It is 
estimated that there were 50,000 Christians at the 
end of the first century. At the end of the first cen- 
tury of Protestant Missions in China there are 175,000 
communicants, and at the end of the first half -century 
in Japan, much talked of as one of the fields of slow 
returns, there are more than 70,000 church members. 
Facts demonstrate where theories only contend. 
Christian missions bring the undeniable success of a 
new and better society, and challenge interest through 
the offer of a better way. In times of change men 
breathe ideals as atmosphere, and the masses adopt 
them without stopping to debate them. Thus there 
is a mighty evangelism in custom, and the Kingdom 
of God comes in ways that figures can not register. 

63 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

Time and the tides of progress make for a new era, 
new ideas create new forms, and whole peoples are 
lifted nearer unto the Kingdom that Christ came to 
establish in the earth. 

5. The Man and the Idea. 

The Duke of Argyle said that when you planted 
an incompatible idea down alongside a false belief, 
a superstitious practice, or a cruel custom, there was 
bound to be a revolution. The missionary is a man 
with an idea. And he not only possesses the idea, it 
possesses him, it is incarnate in him, he becomes the 
idea in action. That idea is one that brings a sublime 
faith in the possibility of man; it fills him with an op- 
timistic outlook on the world ; it is backed by unshrink- 
ing confidence in the potentiality of his own life, 
weak as it may be, because he feels God is in it; it 
gives him a vision and he lives for it, though never 
expecting to live to see it, for he is strangely unselfish 
of that which moves most men to action and enjoys 
giving his life for others. His idea is that the good 
news of Christ is able to save unto the uttermost. 
But he does not expect that idea to work by itself. 
Christianity is never impersonal. When Peter con- 
fessed the Lordship of Jesus, the Master told him that 
it was upon such confessions he would build his church. 
The Church of Christ was to be builded out of men 
who accepted his Lordship and undertook to live his 
kind of life. Paul told certain of his converts that 
they were his "epistles, known and read of all men." 
The missionary not only takes the gospel, he is the gos- 
pel, and the testimony from the foreign field is universal 

64 



THINGS FIGURES CAN NOT TELL 

that the mightiest factor in the winning of the pagan 
to Christ is the life and love of the missioner. "The 
mightiest civilizing persons are Christian men," said 
Dr. Fairbairn. He goes, not to confer blessings but 
to implant them, and when he gets them truly im- 
planted into the hearts of his hearers they in turn 
become incarnations of the idea and carry it on to 
others. 

Henry Van Dyke tells a little legend of how Jesus 
was condoled with when he reached Paradise because 
his project of saving the world had so tragically failed 
through his life being taken away. He replied, in 
surprise, that there had been no failure, for Peter 
and John and all the disciples would tell it to others, 
and these in turn to others, and so as each heard and ac- 
cepted he would tell it to others, until at last the whole 
world shall have heard it and believed, and the King- 
dom of God will have come. Darwin said, "The 
lesson of the missionary is that of an enchanter's 
wand." He was atheistic so far as the claims of the- 
ology were concerned, but in islands off the coast of 
Patagonia he had seen the transformation wrought 
by the missionary, and his faith in their power to make 
mightily for the evolution of mankind was so great 
that he sent a missionary contribution thereafter 
every year of his life. What was true of ^Darwin 
is true in this day, both at home and abroad. The 
journalistic interest in missions, which has so rapidly 
arisen in the past few years, is because men of the 
world have seen the forces for civilization laid by the 
missionary and noted that the results are fairly dra- 
matic in their surprises. The awakening of statesmen 

5 65 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

has not been a theological but a sociological awaken- 
ing, and they advocate missions because of their con- 
tribution to human progress. In the foreign fields 
themselves the leaders of the nations which are ad- 
justing themselves to the world order of affairs do not 
hesitate to give the missionary his just assessment 
as a contributor to their new national life. They 
contribute to his schools and hospitals and read his 
literature; they invite him into their councils and send 
their sons to him that he may prepare them to take 
part in the new order of things; they testify that he 
brought the idea to them and that his life has com- 
mended it to all who have understood. 

The missionary is thus the pioneer of social prog- 
ress in the non-progressive and barbarious nations. 
He alone goes without a selfish interest. He alone 
seeks to understand the people to whom he has gone, 
and to confer benefits instead of seeking them. He 
alone does not despise them, but gives them his fullest 
confidence and advocates their cause even though 
they underestimate his motives, or even if they so 
fail to understand him as to traduce him and martyr 
him. Greatest of all, he communicates his spirit to 
his converts and they become willing sacrifices upon 
the altar of the old order that the new may come. 
The history of every great missionary success is written 
in the sweat and blood of the native converts. If 
they have not given their lives in blood and flame, as 
in the martyrdoms of Uganda, Madagascar, and China, 
they have given them in living sacrifices for the sake 
of their neighbors whom the gospel taught them to 
love. Their teacher incarnates in them his own 

66 



THINGS FIGURES CAN NOT TELL 

Christ-like faith in men. In Korea the native elders 
of many churches will not accept an inquirer for bap- 
tism until he has brought another inquirer to be 
taught. In Samoa, Robert Louis Stevenson, who 
had met most of the great of earth in his time, said of 
one of the native missioners, that he was the finest 
specimen of Christian manhood he had ever looked 
upon. James Chalmers wrought for years with the 
native missioners of the South Seas, and boldly com- 
pared them with the choicest and most heroic spirits 
of history. In China to-day young men are turning 
from lucrative governmental positions to teach their 
fellows the riches of the knowledge of Christ. The 
missionary gives the people a vision and they do not 
perish, but are made alive with new life. He multi- 
plies his number by scores and finally by hundreds 
and thousands, and these become the leaven of the 
nation. Their numbers are no criterion to their value 
in the life of the people. Their influence is out of all 
proportion to their power. Upon their backs, as upon 
that of Atlas, a world is lifted into new being. 

It was an apothegm of ancient paganism that 
"a man is a wolf to a man he does not know." The 
missionary turns men from the conquest of one another 
to that of self and of nature and its hidden powers. 
He teaches the Brotherhood of Man, and puts faith 
in the place of the old and paralyzing suspicion that 
characterizes heathenism. He demonstrates that it 
is more heroic to die for a cause yourself than it is to 
kill another in behalf of a cause. His way of progress 
is by means of service rather than by the way of 
material gain. He brings material gain as one of the 

67 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

inevitable consequences of civilization, and a new con- 
ception of toil as more honorable than idleness, and 
implants the revolutionary idea that every individual 
has an inalienable right to his own life and the fruits 
thereof, but he does not bring a materialistic con- 
ception of progress, nor seek to confer a higher life 
through the worship of mammon. With Edward 
Everett Hale he believes that " progress is always 
spiritual," and so seeks to found the fundamentals of 
it in the moral life of a people that the flood and 
ebb tides of worldly acquisition will never be able to 
sweep them off its firm foundations. 

The religion he takes is unlike all others in that 
it is not racial or nationalistic. It does not rely upon 
mass movements for its conquests, nor seek to gain 
peoples through battles, or by law. Charlemagne 
sought to convert the Saxons to his half-learned Chris- 
tianity by a military crusade. He had to repeat the 
military invasion several times, but found that they 
were as pagan as ever. A wise bishop of the church 
advised him to try the more Christly method of per- 
suasion and benevolence, and they were won. Vladi- 
mir accepted Christianity as a matter of state and sent 
priests with soldiers to baptize his subjects. They 
had the choice of baptism or death and chose the former, 
and Russia is unto this day half pagan; it has a form 
of religion without the substance thereof. Christian- 
ity makes its appeal to the individual. Jesus frankly 
sought out men. He refused to lead a nationalistic 
movement and spent much of his time with single 
individuals. His conquest of the earth must proceed 
by the process of winning single individuals. But 

68 



THINGS FIGURES CAN NOT TELL 

these individuals are never to be individualistic. They 
become social factors in just the measure that they 
become his men. None of them lives unto himself, 
but counts the things of others as his own. The in- 
dividual is the beginning of the conquest, but society 
is the end; he is the factor through whom the gospel 
works for the upbuilding of the Kingdom of God, but 
he is never apart from the whole of humanity, nor is 
his obligation ever discharged until the whole world 
is redeemed, and redeemed in all its ways. A native 
Hindu has said, in commending Christianity, "The best 
way to raise the individual is to raise the society of 
which he is a member." 

The missionary goes to his task with a divine pa- 
tience. He looks upon himself as a "worker together 
with God," and he is willing to sow and nurture while 
a Divine Providence brings in the increase. Living- 
stone and Gordon knew Africa, and felt its woes as 
did no other living men, but they did not fret over it. 
They knew that the processes of a universe are slow 
and they were willing to wait, content only if they 
had done their part. The missionary idea is optimistic. 
It is surcharged with the faith that all things are pos- 
sible. History testifies eloquently to its force, even 
when it has been borne in earthen vessels. It comes 
not with theories or speculations or ologies, but with 
life itself. Stanley believed that if all the rest of the 
world were suddenly bereft of Christianity, there was 
enough vigor and understanding of the simple and 
essential things of it in the native Uganda church to 
spread it over the world again. 

It has been a man with an idea that has inaugurated 
69 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

every reform and marked the beginning of every new 
epoch. The idea of Jesus that every man could be 
saved, and that it was possible to create a perfect 
moral order of society through fealty to the things de- 
sired by the Heavenly Father, is the most potential 
that was ever loosed in the minds of men. It is the 
missionary idea, and with it the missioner goes to his 
task, "becoming all things to all men, if by any means 
he may win some." He makes commerce and rail- 
roads and telegraphs and schoolhouses and govern- 
ments his handmaidens, but the thing he does is to 
create a new Brotherhood of Man in the name of him 
who was a friend to every man. 



70 



CHAPTER II 

The Home: The Corner-Stone of 
Civilization 

1. House or Home. 

Christianity offers the world the ideal of a home. 
Paganism has no term for home. The abiding places 
of men are simply houses. Where there is no mutual 
refinement or respect between husband and wife there 
can be no true home. Heathenism demands that the 
wife regard the husband with an attitude of worship, 
while he may look upon her with total disrespect. In 
him she is to find her salvation. Dr. W. A. P. Martin 
says he saw three thousand women praying in a temple 
in China, and their petition was that they might be 
reborn men. Hinduism and Buddhism alike teach 
that her only hope is to serve him faithfully, that she 
may be saved with him and serve him forever. Thus 
she has willingly immolated herself on his grave and 
received praise for her devotion, for her husband was 
her god. 

The Koran is a man's Bible. Woman had greater 
respect in Arabia before Mohammed than she has 
under his teachings. To satisfy his desire for many 
wives the rule of polygamy was made. He limited 
his followers to four wives each, but took many more 
himself, and allowed concubinage. He sanctified 

71 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

polygamy, slavery, and divorce, and made them all 
man's prerogative, while woman became the victim 
of each one. Consequently there is no home in Islam. 
The harem is a house where the wives, concubines, 
and slaves of the wealthy Moslem are kept. It knows 
nothing of love unless it be the passing favor of the 
lord for some pretty young inmate of his establishment. 
It is a place of jealousy, intrigue, and suspicion. Mrs. 
Isabella Bird Bishop says she was approached scores 
of times with the request for poison to put an end to 
the life of the favorite or her child. She describes the 
pleasures of the harem as being disgusting, and the 
language of common conversation unfit for refined 
ears. 

What is true of the harem is true of all polygamous 
homes. They are simply houses where the family 
live and are sheltered and fed, but they have none of 
the sanctity of a real home, nor can they have, for two 
wives can not dwell together in harmony — it is not 
nature's design. Polygamy implies the subjection 
of woman and the lordship of man, and thus destroys 
that equality without which a home can not be founded. 
There is a Hindu proverb which says, "The cow is 
sanctified, but woman is depraved." The masses of 
people do not accept that proverb literally, for there 
is much affection between husbands and wives, and 
especially do sons reverence their mothers as far as 
it is possible for a "superior" being to reverence an 
"inferior." But the ideals of heathenism are all 
against the wife and mother because she is a woman. 
Christianity offers no loftier sentiment than that for 
mother. Its ideals exalt woman's function and thus 

72 



THE HOME 

exalt the home and make it what De Tocqueville 
called it — "The cornerstone of the nation." 

The family meal is the altar of the Christian home. 
There reverence and gratitude are paid the Creator, 
and the sacrament of family communion is kept. 
The bonds of family affection and mutuality are hal- 
lowed with converse over topics of common interest, 
and all minds and hearts are made one as they partake 
of the food that is provided by the co-operation of 
all its members. The pagan family does not have 
the common meal. In Africa and other savage lands 
the woman eats alone and after her lord has departed. 
In more cultured pagan lands she serves him and par- 
takes of what is left. Among some barbarous peoples 
she is not allowed to eat of the same kind of food that 
he does. Even in Japan it is not good form for the 
ladies of the house to eat with the husband and guests. 
The rule in pagan households is for the sexes to eat 
separately. The female members of the house are the 
servants of the male members. 

Modesty is the means in which society clothes 
itself for the protection of the finer sentiments, and the 
practice of it is the line of demarcation between the 
lower and higher forms of social life. It begins in the 
home and in the mutual regard its members possess 
for one another. It is the safeguard thrown about 
young people to guarantee purity of manners and the 
sanctity of virtue in their commingling. It is whole- 
some when it is unconsciously practiced, but becomes 
a means of unholiness when it is not natural and worn 
with grace. Christianity cultivates a natural modesty. 
It clothes womankind with refinement of manners 

73 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

and gives her the freedom of friendship and the fel- 
lowship of innocence. Paganism suspects womankind. 
It regards her as a snare rather than a grace, and a 
danger instead of an inspiration. It allows no court- 
ship because it has no confidence in virtue. The 
right to choose a life companion is denied youth. The 
contract is made by parents or guardians, and there 
is usually a money consideration involved. The ex- 
change of money implies the relationship of servant 
where the groom pays for it, or that girls are a burden 
to be disposed of where the father of the bride pays it. 
In savagery girls are sold as slaves and treated as 
such. A man's wealth and social position are deter- 
mined by the number of wives or female slaves he pos- 
sesses. In India girls are a burden because they 
must be married with a dowery, i. e., some man must 
be paid for taking them. In both cases there is a sen- 
sual idea of woman's position. In the zenana she is 
kept in seclusion because she is not trusted. The 
purdah is the result of an age-long attitude of sus- 
picion toward womankind. The Moslem either con- 
fines his wife in the harem or compels her to wear a 
veil in public. In either case he advertises his dis- 
trust of her and breaks down that sense of unconscious 
modesty that makes womankind the symbol of all 
that is purest and best to the Christian mind. Her 
seclusion, and the walls of distrust built around her 
by heathenism, deprive her of confidence and destroys 
her integrity. 

It is a Christian proverb that no house is large 
enough for two families. Every home has its holy 
of holies, into which none may come but its own im- 

74 



THE HOME 

mediate members. The intimate bonds of the home 
are those of closest relationship, and to destroy the 
inner confidences with the encroachment of even be- 
loved friends or other relatives is to weaken the home 
bonds themselves. Christianity says a man shall 
leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife, 
and they twain shall be one flesh. The patriarchal 
household makes this close attachment impossible. 
In India and China as many as forty are found under 
one patriarchal roof. Sons bring their wives to the 
parental roof-tree, and all are subject to the father so 
long as he lives. The daughter-in-law must obey 
her husband's mother, and is often the subject of 
tyranny. There is a common treasury and the mother 
provides the common pantry. Delinquent members 
of the family come to be provided for, and there is no 
inspiration for the various individuals to cultivate 
thrift. Idleness begets idleness, and all are pulled 
down toward the level of the least worthy of the house- 
hold. The house is the scene of quarreling between 
the various wives and families, and envy, distrust, 
and jealousy run riot. An imperious old woman can 
make life an inferno for every daughter-in-law, and 
sons are set at strife in defense of their families, or 
husbands and wives at variance through hatred of the 
women for one another. The intimate confidences 
are lost to the children. They have no sense of family 
life as they have in a Christian home, and are used 
to bickering and strife, and learn to be selfish instead 
of mutually helpful. There is much unrest with this 
manner of life in India wherever the better way of 
independent homes is seen through the coming of 

75 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

Western ways, but the orthodox sentiment is yet so 
strong that when the Madras legislature passed a law 
legalizing the right of every man to his independent 
earnings, riot was threatened and the law repealed. 
The permanence of the home depends upon the 
sanctity of the marriage relation. The divorce evil 
is one that demands attention in our Christian lands, 
but if it is menacing here what shall we say of it in 
pagan lands, where there is almost no constraint? 
In civilized Japan every sixth marriage is dissolved ; 
a few years ago it was every third one. Japan now has 
a law that makes divorce a matter of court decree, but 
it still allows the bond to be dissolved by mutual 
agreement, and, as a matter of fact, the larger number 
are thus dissolved. China allows seven causes for 
divorce, among which is talkativeness. Nearly all 
pagan lands allow a woman to be put away if she is 
childless, and most of them give the husband practically 
the sole right of divorce. Mohammedanism gives the 
husband the sole right ; the common practice is to have 
one wife at a time, but to have many in the course 
of a lifetime. Short time marriages are common in 
Arabia and Turkey. One resident in Arabia says he 
scarcely knows of a man of thirty that has not been 
married to from two to five women. Where woman is 
not on a plane of equality with man he will not greatly 
respect her rights. If he regards her as having no 
soul, or as an inferior order of being, he will not be 
sensitive to her feelings. Where she is his servant 
and pawn, he ceases to think of her as one having 
rights, and so regards only his own selfish privileges 
and acts accordingly. 

76 



THE HOME 

The mission church insists strongly on the sanctity 
of the home, and makes regard for it a condition of 
membership. If a man has two or more wives he must 
put away all but one. This is a stumbling-block to 
many and a hardship to some, but it is the lesser of 
all the evils involved, for without a monogamous 
home there can be no permanent Christianity and no 
civilization worth the having. "A nation will not be 
better than its homes," says Shailer Mathews. Jesus 
made much of the home in his teachings, and used 
it as type and symbol in the profoundest things of 
his discourses. It is the cornerstone of civilization. 
From it flows all other virtues, and the safety of the 
home is the guarantee of progress. So the missionary 
refuses to recognize concubinage and polygamy and 
casual divorce. The young Korean and Chinese 
churches expel members who take concubines. There 
are no excuses or relenting, though it is a native proverb 
that "A man marries his wife, but loves his concubine. " 
A native Chinese Christian tells blushingly of how 
embarrassed he felt when he determined to walk with 
his wife upon the street, and of how such custom as the 
church taught him brought respect, and finally true 
affection for the woman to whom his parents had 
married him without his having seen her before the 
wedding day. In Japan the Christian custom is fast 
taking hold of the family relationship, and husbands 
and wives may be seen in public and at the table to- 
gether. When the present Mikado proclaimed the 
constitutional regime he rode in public procession with 
his wife, and thus recognized a new attitude toward 
women ; but he celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary 

77 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

of his accession to the throne by taking another con- 
cubine, and his heir is the son of one of these secondary 
wives. The crown prince, however, has only one wife 
and treats her with all the respect of Christian custom. 
The missionary makes a specialty of girls' schools. 
In India but one woman in every 170 can read. The 
missionary aims to teach every girl that comes into 
the church to read, and one-third of all the pupils 
in mission schools are girls. In Syria, Turkey, and 
Egypt especially are schools for girls thriving. The 
modern youth seek them for wives and they are 
honored. Their homes are models of cleanliness, as 
compared with the old type, and they preserve their 
womanly independence; refinement and reticence 
take the place of the old vulgarities, and the Christian 
home can be selected immediately from among those 
not yet redeemed by the higher ideals. Heathenism 
does not govern with a rational discipline, as indeed 
ignorance never does, but beats when angry and coddles 
when in good humor. The Christian home brings a 
higher type of intelligence and a more normal discipline 
for children, and above all, it brings a like regard for 
boys and girls. When plagues break out the Christian 
cottage is more nearly immune, because sanitation 
has been taught there and thus life is better preserved. 
In Samoa the missionaries established a school for 
the instruction of young married couples in the art 
of home-making. Marriage is made a matter of affec- 
tion and not of barter, and the young lady is given, 
first, the right to womanhood before being compelled 
to enter domestic relation, and, second, the right to 
her own will in the choice of a husband. If custom 

78 



THE HOME 

demands that she be not courted, as is allowed in 
Christianized lands, she can at least see the lad who 
is proposed for her and exercise the right of veto. 

2. The Index of Progress. 

The place accorded woman in a society is an index 
of its state of progress. If no nation can endure half 
slave and half free, no society can progress half servant 
and half master. The laws of a state are a record 
of its customs; the maxims of its sages and wise men 
are records of its ideals. With these two records be- 
fore us we have an understanding of the place ac- 
corded woman by the ancients. 

In the Roman world woman was a ward of her 
husband. She was never his equal before the law 
but was under ''tutelage," i. e., under his protection 
and treated as a minor. In Greece not even her 
father could legally will her an estate in her own right. 
She had no freedom to go abroad before her marriage, 
but was kept in seclusion until she could go in her 
husband's right. Aristotle gave her a place between 
that of a freeman and a slave, and Plato said her place 
and honor consisted in keeping the house and obeying 
her husband. That great philosopher suggested a 
community of wives and that none should know which 
were her own children, in order that they might be 
made better citizens of the state; not a high tribute 
to motherhood to say the least. Pericles thought her 
most highly honored when no one spoke of her; as if 
the very mention of her was an immodesty. In Greece, 
as in Rome, she was a minor before the law and was 
treated as were her own children. 

79 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

In both Greece and Rome the husband had the 
legal power of life and death over his wife and children. 
The patriarchal forms inhered in the legislation of 
these governments. Upon marriage, any property 
she possessed passed into the absolute control of her 
husband. She could make no legal bargain after 
marriage, but must act through her husband. To 
mingle with freemen in public and listen to the lectures 
of the philosophers of olden Greece, or to obtain educa- 
tion for herself and have part in the learned professions, 
she was compelled to accept the position of an unchaste 
woman. Aspasia and others of the noted women of 
ancient learning accepted this portion that they might 
break the barriers that stood between womankind 
and a life of learning. The law expressed the position 
which she held in common judgment, though law usu- 
ally follows the progress of custom, and she was often 
accorded privileges before the law recognized them. 
Augustus legalized concubinage, and in all social life 
the trend of imperial Rome was downward from the 
more severe codes of the republic. She was distrusted 
by the sages, and their ideas offered no hope of a better 
position to her. Plato spoke of her as "that part of 
the race which is by nature prone to secrecy and 
stealth." Seneca thought most women to be "cruel 
and incontinent in their desires." Cato declared 
"all women were plaguey and proud," and expelled 
Manilius from the Senate "because he had kissed 
his wife in the daytime and in the presence of his 
daughter." 

So severe was the law that custom ran counter to 
it and there grew up a form of "free marriage" in 

80 



THE HOME 

Rome. It gave woman more freedom, but did it at 
the cost of her morals and her influence. Under it 
she could hold her own property and retain member- 
ship in her father's family, but the result was short- 
time marriages and every form of marital looseness. 
She could divorce her husband, and Seneca said, 
"There are women who count their years, not by the 
number of consuls, but by the number of their hus- 
bands." Gibbon says that "passion, interest, caprice, 
suggested daily motives for the dissolution of mar- 
riages." She had her choice between respectability 
under repression of her individuality, or freedom at the 
expense of her virtue. In neither case was she in a 
position of equality with her brother. 

Our Teutonic ancestors, according to Tacitus, pur- 
chased their wives and held right of life and death 
over them by law, but held them in much higher es- 
teem than did the Romans. She shared his camp and 
wilderness life and with him bore the burdens of war 
and the chase. Anglo-Saxon wives were known to 
have immolated themselves on their husband's grave. 
Polygamy was not unknown, but one husband, one 
wife, was the rule, and infidelity on the part of the 
wife was terribly punished at the husband's discre- 
tion. Her virtues were prized and she could inherit 
property from her father, though her husband alone 
could sell and manage her estate. She was under tute- 
lage because she could not fight, but her position was 
a vast improvement over that of the luxurious South. 
Says Tacitus, "They carry on their affairs, fenced 
about with chastity, corrupted by no enticements of 
spectacles, by no excitements of convivial feasts." 

6 81 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

When these barbarians made conquest of Rome, 
they were horrified by the state of life they found, 
but fortunately Christianity had come with its re- 
demptive social power and showed them the promise 
of better manners. 

In the accounts of the life of Christ, and in the 
history of the Apostolic church, woman is accorded 
honor and esteem. Marriage vows were strict and 
the bond was one of equality. Through the infant 
church there grew up in the midst of ancient society 
the norm of a better social and family life, that in the 
course of time elevated woman to a position of uni- 
versal honor and issued in the chivalric devotion of the 
middle ages. Formerly her weakness had made her 
the object of subjection, but it now came to make 
her the object of protection. Chivalry tended to make 
her but an ornament and to set her aside from the 
courses of virile life, but, once her position was re- 
deemed from that of tutelage, she claimed her in- 
tellectual rights. The early church recognized her 
as an office-bearer and as the chief ministrant of charity. 
If it denied her the privilege of public discourse, it 
was only to save her from the criticism of an age that 
conceived of all public women as of doubtful character, 
and to the more securely fix respect for her in the 
public mind. 

Constantine's laws first adopted Christian princi- 
ples in any form into the Roman code. He did not go 
far in his inculcation of them, but he recognized them. 
He gave woman equal civil rights with man, and abol- 
ished concubinage and forbade any woman remarrying 
who had divorced her first husband without good 

82 



THE HOME 

cause. The later and more Christian code of Jus- 
tinian abolished the absolute power of the husband, 
gave the wife legal rights to movable property, al- 
lowed her to become the legal tutor of her children, 
and began to make her the mother that modern law 
proclaims her to be. In the middle ages the church 
was paganized by the world to such an extent that the 
Christian ideal made slow progress, but the voice of 
the church councils was generally in favor of the larger 
rights of womankind. Canon law, i. e., the law of the 
church, was more progressive in regard to women, 
children, and slaves than were the laws of the kings. 
The Christian kings from the days of Ethelbert of 
Kent and of Charlemagne led in the recognition of 
woman's growing rights, and especially sought to re- 
deem her from purchase and insure her a dowery. 
Charlemagne took severe measures to repress divorce 
and declared he made the laws in recognition of the 
principles of Christianity. She was finally allowed 
to appear in court in her own behalf, and at last, in 
the thirteenth century, France declared her no longer 
under "tutelage." The old Germanic idea of force 
as the source of authority began to give way to the 
more benign precepts of Christianity, and the theory 
of innate human rights began to take its place. 

The story of civilization is the story of woman's 
progress. No society can advance beyond the ideals 
it holds of motherhood. Christianity has abolished 
bridal purchase and has elevated woman from legal 
tutelage to the position of a freeman before the law; 
it has made marriage a bond of the soul, and the wife 
a companion of her husband instead of his servant; 

S3 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

it gave the mother the right of guardianship over her 
children, reserved to her the privilege of giving her 
own hand in wedlock, and put her on an equality with 
her spouse in the obtaining of divorce. The religion 
of Jesus has ever championed the cause of the op- 
pressed. It knows neither male nor female, neither 
bond nor free. In all its conquests it has plead the 
cause of woman and rapidly placed her upon a higher 
plane in society. No wonder the old pagan philosopher 
cried, "What women these Christians have!" She 
has ever held honorable place in the Christian church, 
and her virtues are the noblest our religion celebrates. 
"It is a fact significant for the past, prophetic for the 
future, that even as Dante measured his successive 
ascents in Paradise, not by immediate consciousness 
of movement, but by seeing an ever lovelier beauty in 
the face of Beatrice, so the race now counts the gradual 
steps of its spiritual progress, out of the ancient heavy 
glooms, toward the glory of the Christian millennium, 
not by mechanisms, not by cities, but by the ever 
new grace and force exhibited by the woman who was 
for ages either the decorated toy of man, or his de- 
spised and abject drudge," said the eloquent Dr. 
Stors. 

3. Man Everything, Woman Nothing. 

"The theory of heathenism is that man is every- 
thing and woman nothing," says one of the older 
missionaries to China. What was true of the world 
to which Christ came is true of the world to which 
his missionaries go to-day. The late Shah of Persia had 
eight hundred wives. The Emperor of China must have 

84 



THE HOME 

a royal household of women, and the higher officiary 
follow his example. The Sultan of Turkey takes 
slave girls only into his harem, and they are freed only 
upon the birth of sons. The late Sultan was known 
to have killed one of his slave wives with his own hand. 
The Mikado of Japan keeps concubines and the King 
of Siam is a polygamist. African chieftains count 
their wealth by the number of female slaves, and in all 
savagery woman is property to be inherited, purchased, 
and sold as material goods, or animals. In more cul- 
tured pagan lands she is at the disposal of her father 
in marriage, and man's powers border upon, if indeed 
they do not become, that of a slave owner. In China, 
Siam, and India monogamy is the rule among the 
masses, but concubinage is allowed to all who can af- 
ford it, and divorce is in the husband's hands. To 
say there are no happy women in paganism would be 
gross error, but the average of happiness and the pos- 
sibilities of living any adequate life are far below the 
average of Christendom. Indeed, it may be said that 
the masses of heathen women are content with their 
lot, but it is because they know nothing else, and it 
is Christianity's part to arouse a discontent wherever 
humanity is not living up to its highest possibilities. 
If one desires womankind to be demure and ornamental 
and to act the part of a beautiful toy, he could not do 
better than to go to old Japan, where her subservience 
and ingrained modesty make her petit and winsome 
and obedient. If he wishes her to be subservient, 
obedient, industrious, and dutiful, let him go to China 
where she makes her husband her lord and lives for the 
sake of her sons. But if he wishes her to possess in- 

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SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

dividuality, spirit, independence, and a mind of her 
own, he will go to no pagan land, but to those lands 
where Christianity has had the freest sway and she 
has come into that natural inheritance the Creator 
designed for all his children. 

The proverbs and sayings of the sages are the same 
in modern pagan lands that they were in the ancient. 
In India the Laws of Manu proclaimed that " A woman 
is never fit for independence." They provided that 
she be dependent on her father until she had a husband, 
and upon her sons if her husband was deceased; if she 
had no father or sons, then upon her husband's nearest 
male relative, and if no male relative, then upon the 
sovereign. A reflection of this is found in medieval 
times by the Christian kings making the widow 
their special ward; but they made her such that they 
might provide her protection, while in heathenism she 
is made a pawn by those who are thus made her guard- 
ians. In India widowhood means disgrace. She 
must take off her jewels, shave her head, put on coarse 
garments, eat but once each day, attend no festivity, 
nor mingle with the crowd, for her presence is a curse; 
her husband is dead and she has no one to honor or 
live for, and, by the ideals of woman's place, should 
have died with him. She belongs to her husband for 
eternity and may not remarry, for her hope is in faith- 
fulness to his memory; but if she had died first, her 
husband could remarry as often as he chose. She is 
preyed upon by wicked men, made a slave to her de- 
ceased husband's family, or sent home to be counted 
a burden in her father's household. In India there 
are to-day 25,000,000 of these poor, abject creatures 

86 



THE HOME 

of harsh misfortune, 115,000 of them under ten years 
of age, and none to pity aside from those whose hearts 
have been touched by the compassion of him who so 
often relieved the widow's distress, and made it the 
cardinal practice of his religion to visit her and her 
children in their distress. 

"Man," said Confucius, "is the representative 
of Heaven and supreme over all things. Woman 
yields obedience to the instructions of man and helps 
to carry out his principles. She may take no step 
on her own notion and may come to no conclusion 
on her own deliberation." Like Manu, he prescribed 
that she must be obedient to her father, husband, or 
sons. He said the duties of the house were her sole 
business, and that "beyond the threshold of apart- 
ments she should not be known for evil or for good." 
The character that spells her name is closely akin to 
those that stand for strife and for disorderly conduct. 
Confucius' teachings regarding her individual rights 
were much like those of Plato. The Greater Learning 
said that "the only qualities that befit a woman are 
gentle obedience, chastity, mercy, quietness." Chinese 
women have excellent personal qualities, but are de- 
nied the rights of personality. She is married to whom- 
soever her parents choose and usually not allowed to 
see her betrothed until the wedding day. If she knows 
who he is it is immodest for her to speak to him or 
recognize him upon meeting. After marriage her 
husband may act without much reference to her feel- 
ings if he is so disposed. Very often he is kindly and 
treats her with regard, but it is not demanded of him 
by society. Her father may sell her if he chooses, 

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SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

and, in times of distress, does so without let or hin- 
drance. She thinks of herself as an inferior being 
and knows nothing but the part of humiliation. If 
a Buddhist, she prays to be reborn a man that she 
may be saved, for none but men will be saved. As in 
all pagan lands, the philosophers look upon her as a 
necessary evil, and the masses make her a drudge. 
But in drudgery is her larger spiritual freedom. If 
she has to work she can not be confined to the house 
and her feet must not be bound. She is ignorant and 
apathetic toward the larger things of life and could 
not be expected to be aught but a gossip, a creature 
of intrigue, and quarrelsome. In savage lands she 
is frankly a slave. A man's wealth is measured by 
the number of his wives, i. e., the number of his female 
slaves. She is the slave class because she is the 
drudge, while men are warriors and hunters. When 
protest was made to an African whose wife was carry- 
ing him over a stream on her back, he asked with all 
guilelessness, "If my wife should not carry me over, 
whose should?" 

In pagan lands few women are ever allowed to 
claim the privileges of youth. They are married at 
tender age and burdened with the position of servant 
to their husband's mother and with the duties of 
motherhood. In China the term "slave-girl" is the 
one often applied to a bride, and she is married be- 
tween the ages of seventeen and twenty. Her position 
is better there than in more southern Asiatic lands or 
in any of the savage lands. In India the Brahmanic 
law is that she must be married before twelve years 
of age, and one-half of all are wedded between the ages 

88 



THE HOME 

of ten and fourteen. The contempt of society is 
mightier than the law of the land, and not to be wedded 
before that age is to be disgraced. One girl child 
out of every eight is married between the ages of five 
and nine, and there are at least a quarter of a million 
who are betrothed in their cradles, or before the age 
of five years. In Moslem lands they are married 
before fourteen, and in Siam before twelve, or at thir- 
teen she is sold as a serf to the highest bidder. In all 
these places spinsterhood is a disgrace not to be con- 
doned, and if a girl can not be a wife she must be a 
slave. In Japan her father has a chattle right over 
her and may pawn her into disgrace as a pledge for 
money borrowed, or to pay a debt. Her only recom- 
pense is that the life into which she is thus bartered 
does not disgrace her for the conjugal relationship, 
and she may be married out of it in the course of time. 
This fact alone argues powerfully for the low plane 
of her position, as well as for the low order of morals 
in a nation. 

Being an inferior person, it is not considered that 
she needs education. In China only one out of every 
two or three thousand can read and write. In India 
only six out of every thousand can do so, and the Eng- 
lish Government provides a public school system. In 
Japan she is now being taught in the public schools 
and shows herself the equal of her brothers, as she 
ever has when allowed equal intellectual opportunities. 
Chinese girls find a wide open door and a crying need 
for their talents in medicine, and Japanese women 
are entering the teaching and nursing professions, 
after the manner of American and English young 

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SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

ladies. In India, where her ignorance is most, abject 
and where it was said that you had as well put a razor 
in a monkey's hand as to give woman an education, 
she has furnished poets, novelists, teachers, and other 
leaders, especially in works of benevolence. Pandita 
Ramabai was widowed in early life, but she was in 
fortunate position, and coming to America interested 
Christian people in her design to found a home for 
her country's child widows. She began in 1889 
with two, and now has over two thousand under her 
care in her community at Poona. Dr. W. A. P. 
Martin says the minds of these women are not dull, 
and that they are stupid only because untaught; that 
the girls of China are among the brightest of pupils 
and always possess the best morals. They have been 
reared in twilight, and when brought out into the sun- 
light of instruction they blossom with beauty. The 
untaught women of paganism become the chief con- 
servers of the old ways, because they are immersed 
in superstition and are conservative through ignorance. 
To debase a mind is to make it its own worst enemy 
and to destroy within it all power of initiative. Women 
are the slowest to accept Christianity because they 
are most difficult of access, and because of the tempera- 
ment acquired through subjection and superstitions. 
It is not to be thought that she has no influence. The 
very devotion in which she serves her lord gives her a 
vast influence over him. She has the care of her sons 
during their plastic early period of life, and as the 
only honor she receives is that of mother, she never 
loses a sort of dominance over them. 

To the native mind it looks like social anarchy to 
90 



THE HOME 

so radically change the position of woman and to so 
reorder all conceptions of the home as Christianity 
proposes. Most of the household acts of pagan life 
are radically connected with religion, and the super- 
stitious mind can see nothing but religious disruption 
in the change. In China the worship of ancestors 
is a household act and woman can not perform it; 
she must provide sons or her husband and his ancestors 
can not receive tribute. All her religious hope is in 
the present arrangement. In India every household 
has its idol, and daily obeisence must be made as a 
protection from the evil eye and other misfortunes. 
Woman knows no god except through her husband, 
and the idea of a personality for herself is foreign to 
her. No pagan religion holds a high ideal for woman. 
Christianity demands that she have the right to stand 
before the altar with her brothers. It asks equality 
of individuality for her when her husband has been 
accustomed to think it a disgrace to speak of her other- 
wise than apologetically. Even Buddhism, the most 
humane of all pagan faiths, gives her a character of 
passivity and makes her a negative personality, the 
shadow of her husband. Her status is fixed religiously, 
and religion is the mightiest of conserving forces, as 
well as the greatest of dynamics in reform. Whether 
it will act as a dynamic or a static force depends upon 
its principles, and Christianity is the one great re- 
formative faith. 

Everywhere are the signs of awakening. Here 
again the missionary confers a vast benefit over and 
above the actual making of converts. The ideal of 
home and motherhood that he takes finds lodgement 

91 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

in the good soil of the better nature of men in heathen- 
ism and is bringing forth fruitage. Mere example 
is not enough. The Parsis have dwelt in Bombay for 
centuries, and their women have been given an equality 
with men and educated as their brothers have been. 
This fact, together with their rejection of caste, has 
made them superior among native Hindu peoples. But 
India passed them by without learning the lesson, and no 
Parsi would stoop to teach it, for his is not a missionary 
religion. But Christianity inculcates the lesson by 
entering into the hearts of men. It may not lift all 
conviction to the level of actual conversion to the 
church, but it lifts multitudes to the level of more 
humane custom and better ways of thinking. The 
Gaekwar of Baroda is not a Christian, but he is awake 
to the need of reforms in India, and is one of its most 
advanced rulers. He has broken caste by traveling 
abroad and openly preaches the superior social life 
of Christianity. As quoted by Robert Speer, in his 
"Christianity and the Nations," he says regarding 
India's women: "Early marriage must increase death 
and disease among mothers, swell infant mortality, 
and injure the physic of the race. A too strict Purdah 
mutilates social life and makes its current dull and 
sluggish by excluding the brightening influence of 
women. By denial of education to women we deprive 
ourselves of half the potential force of the nation, deny 
our children the advantage of having cultured mothers, 
and by stunting the faculties affect injuriously the 
heredity of the race." In Japan women are taking 
a place in intelligent society and in public affairs. 
In China a recent meeting to protest against the opium 

92 




<3 

8 









o"! 



,-8 



THE HOME 

traffic was not only attended by women, but they par- 
ticipated in it on an equality with men. In India 
societies are now organized looking to the redemption 
of her position through raising the age for marriage, 
encouraging the marriage of widows, and providing 
for her education. The day of her emancipation is 
dawning, but Robert Speer says, "The non-Christian 
principles of class and sex inequality have ruled the 
whole world except where Christ has changed it." 

4. The Divine Right of Childhood. 

In nothing does Christianity shine more resplendent 
by contrast than in its treatment of children and in 
its claims of natural right for them. When Jesus 
took the little ones in his arms and blessed them, 
he conferred upon childhood a benediction that has 
blessed it wherever his gospel has carried the good 
tidings of his emancipatory message. Heathenism 
is condemned by no one thing more than by its in- 
sensibility to human pain and the utter numbness of 
its sympathetic powers. In modern times, as in 
ancient, the rule of the pagan world is that the right 
of the father is supreme over the life of his offspring. 
The child is treated as the property of its parent, 
and its chance in life is bounded by his human interest 
in it. Under a culture that is so little characterized 
by the finer sentiments of humanity and that knows 
so little of charity, the rights of childhood can not 
be many. Sons have ever had the better chance in 
life, because of the selfish interests of the fathers. 
They have been privileged, not by any inherent rights 
of their own as human beings, but through the selfish 

93 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

concern of their fathers. Daughters have suffered 
the ignominy of being born females. In ancient times, 
as in modern, heathen parents valued them little if 
times were hard, or if luxury was great and their care 
a burden. 

Quintillian said, "To kill a man is often held to be 
a crime, but to kill one's own children is sometimes 
considered a beautiful action among the Romans." 
In the midst of the city of Rome stood the Lactrian 
columns. At their feet children that were not wanted 
could be taken in the night, and to them came barterers 
in human flesh, to claim whatever their inhuman 
choice might prefer. Occasionally a childless woman 
might come to get consolation for her empty heart 
and take one of the exposed little ones to her motherly 
bosom; often men and women came to get for their 
households those whom they could make slaves or 
servants ; more often the abandoned little ones fell into 
the maws of those inhuman beings who are willing 
to traffic in the flesh and blood of their kind and to 
rear children as they might cattle for lives of toil, or 
worse, that they might sell them into the shambles 
of shame. Those who placed them there knew what 
the results were to be, but they perhaps considered 
it better than the custom of strangling them to death 
with their own hands, or exposing them in the wilds 
for the beasts to prey upon. Most horrible of all it 
was not unknown for witches to seek their dead bodies 
that brains and vital parts might be used in their 
abominable incantations. Greece practiced what we 
have here noted of Rome. . In neither country did 
a child have any standing before the law. Its life 

94 



THE HOME 

was utterly in its father's hand. Under the Stoics 
some gain was made in obtaining natural rights, and 
the gradual enlightenment that time brought ameli- 
orated their fate in custom, but little was really gained 
until Christianity struck the hearts of men with com- 
passion and began to find lodgement in legal enact- 
ment, through the codes of Constantine and Jus- 
tinian. The former ordered that when children could 
not be supported at home they should be brought 
to the officials and supported from the treasury. 
What such support was worth may be judged by the 
like provision made in modern China, where it is said 
the filth and squalor of government provided asylums 
are indescribable and the death rate high, while 
it is pitiful to hear the wails of the little orphans, 
half cared for at the hands of an officiary which knows 
no compassion beyond that imbibed from heathenism. 
What was done by ancient heathenism is done by 
modern. There yet exists in China the towers into 
which parents could put their undesired little ones 
at night, and to which those who desired them for any 
purpose could come to obtain them. In famine times 
children are sold for a few shillings, and it is no un- 
common sight to see the bodies of little girls exposed 
at the riverside. Infanticide is one of the most open 
and brazen of heathen customs. When in 1870 the 
registration of births was made compulsory in India, 
whole villages were found to have but one girl child 
to ten boys. In 1843 in one whole tribe not a female 
infant could be found. In whole provinces it was 
found that there was but one girl child to every six 
boys, and there are authorities who declare that to 

95 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

this day what can not be longer done in the open is done 
by stealth in innumerable cases. Poverty preys upon 
the bodies of children now as among the ancients, 
and poverty is one of the omnipresent phenomena of 
heathen lands. In the fourth century it reached the 
climax of its devastations in Rome, and all the laws of 
the empire were powerless to prevent the inherent 
paganism of the masses from practicing the olden 
horror. The same is true in modern India and China, 
and even more so among the untutored sons of bar- 
barous lands. 

, Among some tribes of Africa children born other- 
wise than according to prescribed custom are immedi- 
ately killed. Some kill all twins, and most tribes make 
way with deformed or unnatural babes. The ancients 
destroyed their defective babes, or even worse, allowed 
them to be mangled that they might be used for beg- 
ging, just as we are told is done in modern pagan lands 
where there is no Christian law to forbid. Seneca 
said: " Monstrous offspring we destroy. It is not 
anger but reason to thus separate the useless from the 
sound." Among the Gallas of Africa the custom is 
to throw any first-born child that happens to be a 
girl into the woods to die. Among other tribes all 
twins are destroyed. In the South Seas the mission- 
aries found the strangling of infants one of the com- 
monest of customs. In other places all born in certain 
seasons were destroyed, and there is scarce a bar- 
barous land where is not found the practice of de- 
stroying child life with impunity. Heathenism is 
stricken with a lack of pity and dominated by the 
brutality of the strong. Gibbon says, "The exposi- 

96 



THE HOME 

tion of children was the stubborn vice of antiquity." 
It prevailed down until the fourth century in Rome, 
and among the less tutored races of Europe until 
Christianity gained authority over their consciences. 
The sacrifice of children prevailed in Prussia until 
within a thousand years of our own time. It prevails 
until this day among peoples in a like stage of barbar- 
ism, wherever they may be on the earth. Christianity 
is the only religion that champions the rights of the 
little ones as their divine heritage. It is the only 
religion that holds their example up as a type of the 
better life and says, "A little child shall lead them." 
It alone provides orphanages for them and punishes 
crimes against their persons as against those of adults. 
That which heathenism makes their offense, viz., 
their weakness, Christianity makes their defense, and 
provides extra precaution for their protection. 

But it is not in matters of life and death alone, 
nor in the supreme authority of parents to barter and 
sell them that they suffer in non-Christian lands. It 
is a Chinese saying that there is a "pail of tears for 
every bound foot." The suffering entailed upon mil- 
lions of little almond-eyed girls by that cruel custom 
can not be estimated. It was not sanctioned by Con- 
fucius, but is the social custom of centuries. To-day 
Anti-Foot Binding Societies are thriving in China. 
They were organized by missionary women and are 
fostered by statesmen who acknowledge their debt 
to the missionary. To have large feet in China is to 
be out of fashion and to suffer that cruel ostracism 
which Dame Fashion administers, even in Christian 
lands, with terrible severity. Few desire such girls 

7 97 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

in wedlock, and they are made a laughing stock and 
an object of jibes from their own sex. It will take 
time to uproot such a social custom, and no less a 
power than one that will, like Christianity, make it a 
matter of conscience can ever succeed. The pitiable 
case of the child widow in India was spoken of in a 
previous section of this chapter. Though the law now 
forbids the marriage of any child under the age of 
twelve, or before fourteen if protested, it is not en- 
forced where native sentiment does not approve it. 
The only relief for the child life of heathenism is 
the new valuation of life which Christianity brings. 
Even if the gross cruelties of sale and death are for- 
bidden through a greater enlightenment, there will 
be no real emancipation until Christianity brings its 
divine right of childhood. In the midst of ancient 
society the church stood as the savior of child life. 
It forbade the exposure of little ones and made it a 
virtue to rescue them. It founded asylums and ad- 
ministered them for centuries before governments 
learned that the founding of such institutions were a 
part of their responsibility. In mission lands to-day 
the church does the same work. In famine times in 
India it has rescued its tens of thousands, and at all 
times has entered its note of protest against abhorrent 
custom. The supreme right of the father extended 
to maturity and beyond among the ancient pagans, 
just as it does to this day in modern China. He had 
the legal power of life and death and his will was su- 
preme by the patriarchal law. It was not until Con- 
stantine wrote his code that the right to kill a son in 
punishment was denied, and not until in the days of 

98 







•Si 






8 55 



THE HOME 

the more Christian laws of Justinian that a son was 
given rights to his own property. China is yet living 
in that ancient era so far as legal rights are concerned, 
but she is receiving a vast leaven from Christian in- 
fluences and will recast more law and custom within 
the next generation than Rome did in three centuries. 
The church was small in Rome, but she brings with 
her the mighty impact of a Christianized civilization 
to these modern nations and the race will be more 
quickly run. 

5. The Missionary Home a Social Center. 

The missionary home is a sort of social settle- 
ment in the midst of the pagan community. The 
settlement idea is that of simply living and making 
a home in the midst of a neighborhood that has need 
of higher examples of living. The friendship of neigh- 
bors who will uplift and lend a helping hand is believed 
by settlement workers to be the primal means of ef- 
fecting social good. They conceive of the home as 
being as much personal as institutional, and as the 
chiefest medium through which neighborly help can 
be extended. The settlement is a neighborhood 
house and to it all are welcome as friends, for through 
personal friendship religion reaches its most perfect 
social interpretation. 

Some have said that the greatest single contribu- 
tion of missions is that of the Christian home. If the 
home be the foundation-stone of order and progress in 
a civilization, and if non-Christian peoples are found 
to be most lacking in real home life, then the con- 
tribution of a model Christian home is, indeed, one of 

99 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

the chief contributions to be made to their social wel- 
fare and uplift. In it are found those exemplary 
characters which, however we may consider them as 
the most fundamental objects of Christian culture, 
are never made outside of association with other in- 
dividuals, and whose virtues shine never so resplend- 
ently as in the intimacies of family life. 

One missionary woman tells how she did her work 
through her home duties and preached without ser- 
mons through the medium of a quiet and home-like 
entertainment of her native neighbors. The door 
was ever open and the tea cup always ready. The 
housekeepers of the neighborhood were welcomed as 
friends, and sat them down for a friendly chat. Their 
familiar questions were her opportunities. They 
learned of the Christian ideals of home refinements 
and of sanitary housekeeping. She instructed them 
in the wifely arts of mending and fancy work and all 
manner of neat house wifery. Cooking came in for 
its share of talk, and many a lesson was given in hy- 
gienic preparation of foods. In these lessons, given 
through the natural interest of neighbors in her, to 
them, new and strange manner of living, she instructed 
them not to despise their own ways, but to add to 
them the universal needs of cleanliness, economy, 
harmony, beauty, neatness, and refinement; For it 
must be remembered that the missionary does not 
advocate the building of houses after the Western 
model, nor the changing of customs to agree with 
Western innovations, but only that the principles 
of better and more cleanly living be introduced 

100 



THE HOME 

into their ways, and that orderliness and sanitation 
be used in the practice of their native customs. 

One of the curiosities of the missionary home to 
most of its neighbors is the honor and regard paid the 
wife by the husband, and the mutual life they live 
in their family relationships. Love is universally at- 
tractive. Peoples whose customs forbid any inter- 
change of affection between husband and wife are 
attracted to the better way when they see it practiced 
by those whose probity they respect, and they come 
to comprehend that it is the way to a higher happiness. 
When husband and wife go abroad they walk side by 
side, while the pagan wife must ever keep to the rear, 
or go not at all when her husband goes; it excites 
comment and curiosity and not infrequently adverse 
criticism until it is better understood and more familiar 
to their eyes, but gradually it establishes a new re- 
gard for womankind, and in the course of time begins 
to break down the old and insidious practices of dis- 
respect to which their wives have been accustomed 
from times immemorial. To lift one-half of humanity 
into the regard and social respect of the other half 
is a mighty achievement, and when that one-half is 
the motherhood of a race it is scarcely possible to 
measure its effects upon society. 

The orderliness and refinement of the Christian 
home is usually in striking contrast to that of the 
lowly homes about it. In savage Africa houses are 
built low and small, without chimneys or windows, 
and the only means of entrance is through a low door 
that makes entering an acrobatic feat. Inside there is 

101 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

no furniture beyond a possible rude shelf or two, and 
a low bed of grass and mats. The floor is mud or the 
excreta of the herd, tramped hard with native feet, and 
the smoke of the fire fills the air as it seeks outlet 
through the thatched roof or open door. Inside there 
is anything but cleanliness, and the usual refinements 
of separating the sexes and providing for privacy, are 
unthought of. The patriarchal households of the 
more cultured peoples do not allow privacy, and the 
communal village life of the more barbarous tribes 
have never thought of it. In China and India the 
masses live, not in cities, nor in isolated farm-houses, 
as do Americans, nor yet in separate yards, as we do 
in our town life, but in small villages. Their streets 
are narrow alleyways or an unkept country road, and 
the small and unkempt houses are builded close against 
each other. The roofs are low, the street line irregular, 
the open spaces uncared for and full of filth. There 
is no regularity of outline in things, and everything 
bears the impress of disorder. Privacy is not main- 
tained in separated family living. Every one knows 
every one else's business, and the chief diversion of 
the settlement is gossip. There is but one well, and 
to it both humans and animals repair indiscriminately. 
In India it may be a great tank or pool, and cattle 
and men alike frequent it for the quenching of thirst; 
all repair there for the provision of cooking water, 
the doing of the village washing, and to find a common 
center for the village life. The unspeakable sanitary 
conditions can be better imagined than described, 
and the appalling death rate that obtains among 
children needs little lurther explanation. 

102 



THE HOME 

In striking contrast, the village of the native Chris- 
tian community stands as an illustration of how Chris- 
tianity redeems the home life. It is not a paradise 
of beauty and refinement, but it is a vast improve- 
ment over the old manner of family life. The dwelling- 
places are cleaner and the children clothed with regard 
for modesty; the walls are upright and the roofs in 
better repair; the floors may still be of earth, but they 
are more cleanly, and modern conveniences are in- 
troduced with due regard to the meagerness of the 
native income; there is a more industrious type of 
life, especially among the barbarous peoples, for one 
of the things that Christianity takes to them is in- 
centive to work, and a desire for more of the utensils 
of civilization. The heathen home is merely a place 
to get shelter. In tropical lands much of the cooking 
and most of the living is done out of doors, and in that 
is the best protection they have from their dwelling- 
places; otherwise all would surely be afflicted with 
disease, and death would be epidemic. In agricultural 
lands the animals usually live under the same roof 
with their owners ; man and beast can not thus dwell 
together with aught but injury for the man. The 
native Christians may work at the same tasks, follow 
the same general customs, receive the same wage, 
and practice the same economic arts that they did 
in their old life, but they live more wholesomely in 
the midst of the old tasks and surroundings. Their 
children are clothed and their homes places of peace; 
their wages are kept for family purposes and never 
washed on personal vices ; their homes take on an angle 
of uprightness both within and without; the streets 

103 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

are cleaner and a more sanitary manner of life is fol- 
lowed; their wives are treated with kindness, and af- 
fection begins to root in their hearts where all too 
often there was none before; they love peace where 
before discord was the habit of their daily family 
intercourse ; in fact, their home has taken the likeness 
of the missionary home, their village bears witness 
externally to the internal changes in their minds and 
hearts, and travelers say it is easy to tell the village 
where Christian influence predominates. It is a liv- 
ing testimony to the social value of missions. "It 
is refreshing to see the clean houses and villages of 
the Christians, instead of the filthy heathen hovels 
of previous years," said Dr. McKay. 

In the mission home the family find their chief 
delight in the congenial converse of the table around 
the family hearthstone. The pagan family knows 
little of family counsel or mutual conversation about 
a family shrine, such as the missioner makes his 
board and hearth. Rarely does a Chinese child 
ever dine with both father and mother. The father 
is privileged over other members of the household, 
and the male members of the circle are accustomed 
to eating in the congenial company of their superior 
selves. The language of the heathen household is 
anything but pure and refined. Children learn talk 
that put the blush to men's faces, and the customary 
quarreling is carried from the house into the street. 
The father holds the scepter over both mother and 
children, and the mother-in-law over the wives of her 
sons. Arbitrariness is much more the rule than kind- 
ness, and the result is a bitterness in word and feeling 

104 



THE HOME 

and in mutual action that is liable to result in blows. 
Until this day instances are not unknown where parents 
have beaten children into insensibility and even sold 
them deliberately to be rid of them, or to purchase 
opium. The Christian home reproves this sort of a 
family life, and the benign example of Christian af- 
fection and peacefulness arouse in many hearts a 
longing for the better way. The men of the community 
come to respect the wife of the missionary because 
of her talents, for the interest she takes in their homes, 
and because they see her respected by her husband. 
Through the open channels of this regard for her, 
and through the undeniable argument of a greater 
happiness through it, many who before treated their 
women with scant regard or only conventional af- 
fection, come to open their hearts and overcome their 
ancient customs and accord her a real love, and to 
surround their children with a more refined and whole- 
some moral atmosphere. The tendency is well fixed, 
both in China and India, for the family to divide into 
its logical units and each married couple to have a 
separate dwelling-place and a division of income. 
Greater privacy is being guaranteed, and with it must 
come the more dignified manner of living and the culti- 
vating of those personal virtues that arise from a 
greater sense of individuality and of personal rights. 
Thus from the missionary's home radiate sermons 
from actions and an atmosphere that is conducive 
to social health. Its example is eloquent to the very 
human consciousness of its neighbors, and its exhorta- 
tions, though mutely spoken, are more persuasive 
of ten time than an articulate message. To become a 

105 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

neighbor to a man is to fulfill the law of service toward 
him. In the Christian home are the head waters of 
all that fructifies the rich fields of civilization, and no 
greater judgment of failure could be pronounced upon 
a society than to say, as has been said of heathenism, 
that it has no homes. Ten thousand missionary 
homes are bearing their witness on the mission field, 
and the social benefits that flow from that witness 
are mightier than words can tell; there is no statistic 
that is able to enumerate the unbounded good they 
are bringing to the new civilizations that spring up 
wherever they are founded. 



106 



CHAPTER III 

Benevolence: The Heart of Social 
Progress 

1. The Evangel of Humanity. 

Benevolence is the heart of social progress. It is 
through the expanding circles of sympathy that civil- 
ization evolves. The primitive man is selfish; it is 
his kinship to the brute. Sympathy is all but unknown 
to him except as it reacts very directly upon his own 
welfare. But mother love softens the heart of the 
rudest, and its expansion into family affection widens 
the circle of sympathy and broadens unselfishness; 
it is nature's first instinct of sacrifice. Mother love 
expands into brother love. The interwoven interests 
of family merge into those of tribe, clan, neighborhood, 
and nation, and finally become universal. Every 
stage of civilization manifests some measure of this 
larger bond of common interest. China is to-day 
no farther advanced than was the world to which 
the first missionaries went. Africa is but at the dawn 
of human evolution, if indeed it be not a decadent 
continent of people. Paton, Hunt, Geddie, Williams, 
and their compeers found humanity in the South Pa- 
cific Seas almost devoid of the instinct of sympathy. 
Japan had evolved a paternalistic type of society, 
and cared for the suffering with more effectiveness 

107 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

than any other pagan nation. In the change from 
the old to the new, the old system was overthrown 
and the new is being established, substituting national 
for the feudal care of the dependent. The Chinese, 
says Arthur Smith, "display an indifference to the 
suffering of others which is probably not to be matched 
in any other civilized country." They have never 
evolved more than a family type of sympathy, except 
where they have come into contact with Christianity. 
Their naturally fine capacity as a people quickly 
yields to those higher compassions that are native 
to their nature but have never been cultivated. In 
India the caste to which one belongs is alone respon- 
sible for him. There are fifty millions of low caste 
and out-caste peoples who have no one to care for 
them. Paganism has no deep sympathies and the 
circles of human responsibility are small. Neither 
their governments nor their religions furnish such a 
thing as real philanthropy. Old Rome fed thousands 
at the public granaries, but there was no organized 
charity; it was more an act of political expediency 
than of public benevolence. In many Oriental cities, 
including the Mohammedan, there are small insti- 
tutions supported by subscription from the rich, 
but they are few in number and so poorly managed 
that they count for little. Even in Japan the amount 
of public relief is less than one hundredth as much per 
capita as it is in America, and the need is many times 
as great. The mark of progress in civilization is the 
breadth of its interests. The "struggle for self" gives 
over increasingly to the "struggle for others." Pagan 
Rome grew great by the growth of imperialism and 

108 



BENEVOLENCE 

by the creation of a few great through their power over 
the exploited many; but its luxury and heartlessness 
were its ruin. In the fourth century poverty was 
perhaps the greatest it has ever been in Western civil- 
ization. In the midst of it all Christianity grew up 
with marvelous rapidity through its benevolence and 
its appeal to the common man. Rome apotheosized 
wealth and power; Christianity worshiped a Carpenter 
who had "not where to lay his head." Rome's di- 
vinity was a luxurious and dissipated Caesar; Chris- 
tianity's was a pure and humble Nazarene. Rome 
subdued a world by force of arms; Christianity by 
the force of brotherly love. 

The non-Christian world is poverty-stricken. The 
Hon. Chester Holcomb said that if modern American 
almshouses were to be erected in China and thrown 
open to all who would come, two-thirds of the popula- 
tion would be at their doors, because what they would 
receive there would be so much better than what they 
live on all their lives. Bishop Thoburn says that 
one-fourth of the Hindu people live without enough 
to nourish their bodies properly, and that millions 
are always on the borderland of starvation. The 
wages of the common laborer in all these countries 
will average less than one-tenth that of the same 
toiler in our own land. In India men work for from 
six to twelve cents per day, and women at from three 
to four. In Japan wages are not more than twice 
as much, and in China they are no better; servants 
will work for three or four dollars per month and sup- 
port themselves. The average for school teachers 
is but from fifty to sixty dollars per annum. It is 

109 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

not enough to say that living is cheap. It is not 
cheap living, but a low standard of living that makes 
life at all possible to ninety per cent of the people of 
the pagan world. In three thousand years of civiliza- 
tion, Japan, India, and China evolved no standard 
of living that gave them title to human prosperity, 
and the standard of living is the mark of economic 
progress; upon it hangs the possibility of all other 
progress; it is the base line of civilization. 

Where there is so little margin for a livelihood 
there is great suffering when famine comes. In the 
seventies no less than ten million died in the Chinese 
famine. India made little progress in population 
until England stopped the awful devastations of death 
that came with her drouths, by building irrigating 
ditches and providing public relief works and teaching 
the farmers how to conserve their lands ; in one famine 
she spent no less than thirty million dollars in relief. 
Neither India nor China ever made any preparation 
to meet nor any adequate effort to relieve these awful 
holocausts of death. "There are millions more," 
said a Chinese official when his sympathy was asked 
for these famine sufferers; he was an untutored Mal- 
thusian. In India one province suffers while another 
has plenty, but there is no connection established be- 
tween the granaries of the prosperous district and the 
lazar house of the famine ridden, except as Christian 
charity brings the price. 

Buddhist priests are to-day making some agita- 
tion for charity in the name of Gautama. Like Julian, 
the apostate emperor, they rally their coreligionists with 
the cry, "It is a scandal that the Galileans should 

110 



BENEVOLENCE 

support the destitute, not only of their own religion, but 
of ours." The Brahmans care for the sacred cow, but 
they do not erect homes for orphans or asylums for 
lepers. Christianity cares for a million each year in 
the very midst of these pagan faiths. In India alone 
it has eight thousand orphan and famine children in 
its homes and industrial schools. Where the pagan 
religions do any charity it is for the purpose of obtain- 
ing merit. Brahmanism denies the privilege of erect- 
ing institutions because the merit is in the secrecy of 
the gift; thus a very small coin to the beggar or a 
bowl of rice to the fakir suffices. Lecky says Chris- 
tianity's power as a civilizing factor has been in its 
"capacity for producing a disinterested enthusiasm." 
He says the Christian religion has "done more to 
quicken the affections of mankind, to promote pity, 
to create a pure and merciful ideal, than any other 
influence that ever acted upon the world." It has 
ever appealed to the poor and needy and dispossessed 
of the earth, and from them has created the rulers 
of the next age. Its famine children go from their 
schools to create a new type of home and industry, 
and to lead with a new and benign intelligence in the 
common affairs of their fellows. It lights the fires of 
sympathy in humble hearts and the contagion spreads 
from their humble habitations into the hearts and 
homes of their neighbors, and the old customs of cru- 
elty, callousness, and superstition are displaced in 
society. In the South Seas men who once would have 
robbed and eaten the shipwrecked, have been known to 
rescue and succor them. In Dark Africa tribes that 
were ever at war have carried relief to one another 

111 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

in time of distress. In the far North peoples who once 
killed their aged have come to care for them tenderly. 
Wherever the missionary goes he lights the beacon 
fires for the distressed and suffering, and offers them 
hope in the name of the Christ who healed the sick, 
cleansed the lepers, blessed the children, befriended 
womankind, and preached good tidings to the poor. 
There are some practices of heathenism that are 
almost too cruel and revolting to seem possible. Can- 
nibalism is yet practiced in parts of Africa, in New 
Guinea, and in several islands of Micronesia. The 
aborigines of Australia were found indulging the 
horrible practice as late as 1896. In many places 
pioneer missioners have lived to see cannibal chief- 
tains die Christian. One young worldling visited in 
the South Seas, carrying with him a blase sneer for 
the missionary. He was shown a hollow tree, enclosing 
a heap of several hundred stones, and told by his 
native guide that each one represented a human body 
that had been served before the late chieftain, and 
that but for the missionary one would represent him 
there on the morrow. Paton, Geddie, Hunt, Chalmers, 
and many others wrought new creations among can- 
nibal peoples and transformed places of such unspeak- 
able savagery into islands of peace. The Fijians 
contributed liberally to one of the late Indian famines, 
and are to-day the best church goers in the world, 
unless it be, perhaps, the slave-hunting tribes of 
Uganda, whom Mackay and his successors converted 
into disciples of brotherly love. Holcombe tells of 
the horrible manner in which the people of Peking 
disposed of their dead babies. They cared for them 

112 



BENEVOLENCE 

until hope grew faint. They then placed them upon 
the door step and awaited the issue; if they died they 
were accounted no children of theirs; in the early 
mornings a great wagon made the rounds, gathering 
up the little bodies, and they were sent away without 
funeral or tear. In parts of Africa the lepers are killed. 
The Esquimaux of Alaska were found making a holiday 
out of the killing of their aged. The beggars of Chi- 
nese cities are carted out for the dogs to eat, or left 
where they die. Many Hindus carry their dying out 
of the house as soon as death seems imminent, and if 
possible, carry them to the banks of the sacred Ganges 
to gasp out their expiring moments. It is a common 
custom to begin funeral preparations before life is 
gone. Paganism lacks the finer sentiments even 
where it does not possess the most gross. Its circle 
of sympathy is small. Christianity takes to it the 
message of universal brotherhood and gives it a heart 
for humanity. 

2. Clinical Christianity. 

"All missionary work, in the highest sense, must 
be healing work," said the indomitable Mackay of 
Uganda. Mackay used medicine, industrial training, 
carpentry, diplomatic advice, and all other means 
that opportunity offered to break his way into the 
confidences of M'tesa and overcome the frightful 
cruelties of that cruel chieftain's slave traffic, and 
the even more frightful superstitions that made all 
other evils possible. After a lifetime in Africa the 
great Frenchman, Coillard, wished he had another 
life that he might study medicine and spend it in the 

8 113 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

Dark Continent, opening fastened doors, and, like 
Livingstone before him, probe roads of healing into 
the open sores of Africa's savagery. 

The new physiology makes the body sacred, even 
as Christ did when he declared it to be the temple of 
the Spirit. The new psychology knits mind and body 
up together in such manner as to make consideration 
of one impossible without a knowledge of the other. 
The new ethics demands the sacredness of the flesh 
as a means to the holiness of the soul, and our under- 
standing of Christianity, in these latter days, leads us 
to see that there is not only no antagonism between 
spirit and body, but that there is a divine relationship. 
Asceticism revolted against the frightful immoralities 
of base paganism and swung to the extreme of de- 
spising the body, but we find that not emaciation but 
emancipation is the true way of life. Thus we seek, 
religiously, to free ourselves of disease and to live a 
clean and wholesome life, and we find in good hygiene 
one of the ways to upright living. 

Jesus healed as he preached. Indeed, there is as 
much emphasis given in the synoptic gospels to his 
healing as to his preaching. The deaf, blind, dumb, 
lame, fevered, epileptic, insane, all received his merci- 
ful ministrations. He sought out the suffering and 
the suffering sought out him. Multitudes brought 
of their sick that he might touch them and make them 
well. His great-hearted sympathy went out in com- 
passion in the divine ministry of destroying pain. 
It was his care for the suffering of bodily ills that made 
him known above all as the man of compassion. That 
greatest of all encomiums pronounced upon him, de- 

114 



BENEVOLENCE 

scribing him as one who went about doing good, was 
due to his ministry to pain. One of his most used, 
because most significant titles, that of the Great Phy- 
sician, comes from his cure of physical ills. He never 
conceived of his gospel being preached without minis- 
tration to the physical needs of the poor and suffering. 
When he sent out his disciples for their itineraries, 
he told them to go healing and preaching. 

The masses of men live very much in their physical 
beings. Not many are able to arise above pain and 
become saints and poets in spite of it. It is difficult 
to be both a sufferer and a saint, or to be poor and 
practice the refinements of Christianity. That it is 
possible is unanswerable testimony to the spiritual 
power of a true faith, but Christ did not intend that 
poverty and suffering were to be made cardinal means 
to righteousness. He intended rather that through 
the relief of them Christianity should take the world. 
The great world of paganism is a world of ignorance 
and of spiritual numbness. It lives in the flesh, and 
finds its first revelations most easily by relief of its 
pains. "If we want," says Dr. Arthur Lankaster, 
"to write the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ in 
very large letters, so that those who can not read 
theology and do not understand science or philosophy 
can read it very easily, the best way of doing it, whether 
it be for an individual, a village, a town, a district, or 
a nation, is to start medical aid for the poor." "He 
is not from America, he is from heaven," said the as- 
tonished Korean courtiers when Dr. Allen stopped 
the wounds of their dying crown prince. It was a 
sermon without words, but a thousand times more 

115 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

eloquent to their ears than could any have been in 
words. To-day all Korea is listening to the words of 
the evangelists. He may throw our proffered Bible 
aside, said Dr. Williamson, our civilization make him 
all the more a materialist, and we may be unable to 
convince him that we are not preaching for the sake 
of the salary, but heal his disease and ease his suffering 
and he is eternally grateful, and through his friend- 
ship for you will learn of that greater friend. Science 
can be cold and heartless in its quest of mere knowledge, 
but science, set on fire with compassion for men, is 
one of God's means of revealing himself to those who 
are dumb to all other appeals. 

Medicine takes a new humanitarianism to the 
peoples who have not known the sacred art of sym- 
pathy. The Hindu religion will lead its devotees 
to swing themselves by hooks in the back, or sit for 
days on beds of spikes, or to spend $50,000 on the 
wedding of a pair of sacred monkeys, but it never 
built a hospital. "In all my classical reading," said 
Professor Packard, "I never met with the idea of an 
infirmary or hospital, except for sick cats in Egypt." 
Certain sects of Hindu devotees will not sit down 
without first brushing the earth lest they destroy some 
insect life, villages will see their children die by serpent 
and tiger and refuse to kill the beast because its life 
is sacred, but women suffer untold miseries when chil- 
dren are born, little ones starve by the tens of thousands 
in famine times, beggars perish and rot by the wayside, 
for their faith has taught them no such ideas of the 
value of a human life as to lead them to organize chari- 
ties, or build asylums, or create systematic forms of 

116 



BENEVOLENCE 

relief. Multitudes suffer from preventable disease, 
but there is no adequate art devised for their healing, 
and even such physicians as they have will refuse 
them aid because they are too poor to pay. Medi- 
cine, in the hands of a missionary, opens to them new 
visions of the sacredness of life itself. The native 
Christians will care for the poorest and the foulest 
of their fellow-men, where before they would have 
passed them by with no thought, or mayhap joined 
the crowd in jibes at their sad predicament. It was 
no different among the ancient pagans. "Among the 
millionaires of Rome there was not one who founded 
a hospice for the poor or a hospital for the sick," said 
Dr. Dollinger. They had culture and philosophy 
and art, but they had no adequate humanity. Their 
lives were ordered from the standpoint of selfishness. 
The most learned, and those who speculated profoundly 
about the soul and its future, could, with no pang, 
consign the multitudes to a place beside animals and 
argue that they were born to be slaves — men who, by 
their very nature, could never realize on a human 
inheritance. 

Of modern religions the most compassionate is 
Buddhism. There is record of a Buddhist hospital 
three hundred years before Christ, but that religion is 
so profoundly individualistic that it soon lost all power 
for real charity. Its main sanction was that of merit 
for self, and until men forgot self and self's reward 
they are never of great value to benevolence. From 
the first Christianity practiced a self -forgetful charity, 
and began to build institutions for the public care of 
the sick by the end of the first thousand years of its 

117 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

history. Before that they had received care in mon- 
asteries and at private hands, and the law had taken 
account of them from the time it began to take account 
of Christian principles. It is under Christian govern- 
ments that philanthropic institutions are builded to- 
day, and those of Japan and the few instances in China 
are due to Christianity's having come to teach the 
way. 

Dr. Gulick quotes a noted Japanese of the era of 
the first Catholic missions in that land as saying that 
"people contribute to the temple, but never before 
was it heard that a temple contributed to the help of 
the people." Medicine takes a new conception of 
religion in its enforcement of the missionary, and re- 
duces the precept to example in a manner that can not 
be misunderstood by the most ignorant and prejudiced 
of superstitious minds. "Missionary medicine has 
not exhausted its influence when it has healed the sick 
one," says Dr. Williamson in his excellent little volume 
on "The Healing of the Nations;" "it reaches round 
and exerts its power on a larger world than that gathered 
in the hospital waiting room. It pioneers education; 
it stimulates scientific methods; it inculcates sanitary 
principles and introduces plague precautions and deals 
with epidemics. Again and again it becomes of po- 
litical importance; its weight is thrown on the side of 
benevolent undertakings, while all the time it is raising 
in estimation the value of human life and the sacred- 
ness of womanhood. These are stars of the first mag- 
nitude which shine brightly in the firmament of Chris- 
tian Sociology." The itinerary of the medical mis- 
sionary resembles the evangelistic journeys of the 

118 




TT'oords, Syrians, and Moslems in a Missionary Clinic. II- 
■*■ lustrates the manner in which Christian benevolence breaks 
down prejudice. 




Chinese orphan girl before and after treatment in a mission- 
ary hospital. This is a parable of Christian benevo- 
lence on the mission field. 



BENEVOLENCE 

Great Physician. Men come miles to meet him and his 
roadway is the scene of many pitiful appeals ; he touches 
one here and another there and leaves his healing balm 
in a hundred hands every day; he healeth their dis- 
eases and to every one gives the greater prescription 
for the cure of the soul. His dispensary and hospital 
waiting-room are like the evenings at the lakeside in 
Galilee, where the multitudes brought their sick and 
afflicted that the Great Physician might touch them. 
There come the rich and poor to mingle side by side, 
for a great need doth make brothers of them all, and 
all receive, that through the healing of their bodies 
their souls may be freed. 

3. The Devastations of Ignorance. 

There is no science of medicine in the non-Chris- 
tian world. In savage lands, and often in the Orient, 
the profession is mingled with the black arts and the 
profession of witchery. In Africa it is in the hands 
of women who deal in charlatanry, or of the medicine 
man, who is adept in magic and generally the greatest 
fraud and scoundrel in the tribe. He ''smells" out 
the trouble with all due ceremony and locates it in 
the ill will of some enemy or the displeasure of some 
spirit. His cure is one of propitiation for the offended 
spirit, or of " ordeal" for the enemy who has done be- 
witching. "Evil eye" is the fertile cause of many of 
the diseases of superstition. It hedges life around 
with unending regulation, and makes living a terror. 
It indicts many an innocent person with the crime 
of bewitching and is the source of untold enmity and 
of punishment that is undeserved. In China the phy- 

119 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

sicians have many simple herbal remedies that ob- 
servation has taught them to be useful, but they are 
so mixed with the rites of superstition, or the pre- 
scriptions of a credulous ignorance, that they are 
largely deprived of their virtue in actual practice. 
All ignorance is dangerous, but nowhere does it bring 
more direct suffering than in the practice of medicine. 
A lady physician in Persia tells of seeing a native 
quack burn open the frontal fissure in the head of an 
infant that the evil spirit might escape. Another in 
Korea tells of seeing a native practitioner burn heaps 
of brown powder on the breast of a child and follow 
it by thrusting a large needle through each foot, the 
palms of the hands, the thumb joints, the lips, and then 
beneath the nose. A doctor in India tells of a mother 
who brought a child to him for treatment of the eyes, 
saying she had faithfully followed the prescription 
every day for two months; it was to put a powder of 
charcoal and donkey's tooth into the eye. For sup- 
puration it is customary to daub tar or some other 
adhesive over the place where the puss should exude; 
the agony that follows can well be imagined. One 
Chinese cure for hysteria is to put bugs up the nose of 
the victim. Rheumatism is often treated by cutting 
a gash over the aching joint and rubbing cayenne 
pepper into the wound, which is then bound up. The 
native Chinese quack will thrust a long, rusty needle 
into the affected part, to allow the evil spirit to escape 
and then burn the wound to heal it. The liver is 
looked upon as the source of many ills and the people 
are much given to stomach trouble; both organs as 

120 



BENEVOLENCE 

well as the lungs receive the wicked needle when af- 
fected. Gongs are beaten to drive away the demons, 
and the most hideous noises are raised where good 
treatment demands quiet. Many crowd around and 
touch with their filthy hands and clothes, when iso- 
lation is demanded by aseptic necessity. Dr. Keeler, 
of Changli, tells of one man who came to him with 
four hundred punctures of the Chinese needle in the 
spine and thighs. Hindu mothers will be confined to a 
dirty hut for days after the birth of their children and 
compelled to go without either food or water, and then 
be given a cold bath. One Chinaman had tried to cure 
dyspepsia by a two years' course of drinking daily 
a cup of ground stone and water; he had taken forty 
pounds off a grindstone, but was uncured. It is not 
simply the suffering that is uncured, but that which 
is caused in the use of ignorance and superstition, that 
cries out for a scientific medical profession in pagan 
lands. 

The native practitioner has no education for his 
work and is quite as liable to be the most ignorant and 
unsuccessful man of the community as any other. 
There is no knowledge of anatomy and little of materia 
medica. Dissection is unheard of and would be looked 
upon with horror in the Orient. The Chinese believe 
there are five tubes leading from the mouth to the 
stomach, and that both lungs are on one side. The 
Hindus say there are nine hundred bones in the human 
body. There is no adequate diagnosis ; it is largely a 
matter of guess work or of an attempt to locate the 
demon. . Their prescriptions are fearfully and wonder- 

121 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

fully made. Here is a sample as reported by a mission- 
ary physician: 

Powdered snake . 2 parts 

Wasps and their nests 1 part 

Centipedes 6 parts 

Scorpions 4 parts 

Toads 20 parts 

Grind thoroughly, mix with honey, and 

make into pills. 
Dose, two to be taken four times a day. 

Tiger's bones are a sovereign remedy for weakness 
and for cowardice, because the tiger is strong and brave. 
Bugs, beetles, flies, bats, and lizards are common 
remedies. In extreme cases in China the flesh of a 
son or daughter has been prescribed; it would be good 
for the child as well as the parent, for it would thereby 
learn filial obedience. In savage lands charms are 
used, drums beaten, horns blown, and various devices 
resorted to for the overcoming of the demon. Some 
of the blood of the patient may be extracted and given 
to an animal that he may carry the spirit away and 
get the benefit of its residence. It may be hoodooed 
into the anatomy of some special enemy, or it may be 
extracted by the legerdemain of the medicine man 
and held up to the view of wondering relatives in the 
form of a bug or snake or some small varmint which 
he has deftly extracted from his sleeve. 

The death-rate of children is appalling in lands that 
have no scientific medicament. The rate for little 
ones of one year and under is twice as great in -Cal- 
cutta as it is in London; Calcutta is one of the most 

122 



BENEVOLENCE 

modern of Oriental cities and London one of the most 
congested of those in the Occident. The normal 
death-rate for non-Christian lands is twice that of 
Christian countries. It would be much worse but for 
the habit semi-barbarous peoples have of living 
out of doors. In Asia the masses drink hot tea to 
the exclusion of water to such an extent that they 
are saved from the ravages of the germ-laden streams 
and ponds to which the majority repair for use of 
kitchen and wash tub. 

Smallpox has decimated islands in the South Seas 
and taken one-half the populations in Oriental com- 
munities; it was thought to be the devastation of 
demons; one-half the deaths in Korea are through it. 
The United States has banished it from its realm, so 
far as epidemics are concerned, by the use of vaccina- 
tion, and our physicians fear measles more than they 
do the once dreaded scourge of smallpox; but it de- 
stroys with all its terrors where cleanliness is not a 
virtue and there is no knowledge of the nature of dis- 
ease and its transmitting qualities. In the city of 
Canton the population seems to be a pox-marked 
people, as if it were a racial peculiarity. One meets 
the disease in all its forms on the street in mid-day. 
The even more terrible scourges of cholera and the 
bubonic plague have worked their way unhindered 
until in very recent years, and the measures taken 
now are the result of the work of the medical mission- 
ary, except perhaps in the case of India. "How is it 
that you Christians do not take the plague?" said an 
intelligent Chinaman, "we have had processions and 
fire-crackers, and made presents to our gods, but all 

123 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

in vain; we are dying by the hundreds." A village 
in India recently filled the trees about its environs with 
the bodies of decapitated dogs, that the spirits might 
be frightened away as they came to bring the plague. 
In Tibet the heroic expedient of burning the poor first 
victims of smallpox is sometimes resorted to. Cholera 
is one of the most easily avoided of epidemics. It can 
be conveyed only through a very specific contamina- 
tion, and one that endangers no one where every one is 
cleanly. Dr. Osgood says that 60% of the diseases 
the medical missionary meets are those due to uncleanli- 
ness. There is no knowledge of sanitation nor of dis- 
ease germs. An Oriental city smells with the seventy- 
odd smells Coleridge found in old Cologne. The nasal 
organs of the East are benumbed. Sewage is dumped 
in the street and left for dogs to eat. Stagnant water 
stands before houses and in village streets. Drain- 
age is unknown except where civilization has first gone. 
Light is not one of the household commodities and fresh 
air is not prized for its own sake. A medical missionary 
in Persia says that his patients fear both open windows 
and light. Mecca is a menace to all India and Eastern 
Asia; contagion spreads from almost every pilgrimage. 
The pilgrims are filthy and huddle in crowded quarters 
while in the sacred city. Whatever happens is by the 
will of Allah, and precautions are scorned. The Lancet 
gives an incident that illustrates the attitude of a 
Moslem mind toward hygienic regulations. The 
French Government desired to obtain certain informa- 
tion about Moslem cities for the use of its colonial 
office. The following questions were sent to the 

124 



BENEVOLENCE 

ruling Pasha of Damascus, and the answers here given 
were returned: 

"What is the death-rate per thousand in your 
principal city?" 

Ans. "In Damascus it is the will of Allah that 
all should die; some die old, some die young." 

"Are the supplies of drinking water sufficient and 
of good quality?" 

Ans. "From the remotest period no one has died 
of thirst." 

"Make general remarks on the hygienic condition 
of your city." 

Ans. "Since Allah sent us Mohammed, his 
prophet, to purge the world with fire and sword, 
there has been a vast improvement. And now, my 
lamb of the West, cease your questioning. Man 
should not bother himself about matters that concern 
only God." 

Perhaps no tragedy of ignorance is greater than 
that of the lepers and the insane among non-scientific 
peoples. As in Biblical times, the insane are looked 
upon as possessed with demons and are turned out to 
wander; they are shunned as were the lepers who had 
to cry, "unclean, unclean, " at the approach of any one. 
Cases are known of them being walled up until death 
brought release. Violent cases are bound down and 
left with an occasional morsel. Refractory ones are 
beaten, and the custom generally is to accord them 
brutal treatment. On the other hand, some peoples 
look upon them as inspired. Demon worshipers 
stand in awe of them, and their sayings are regarded 

125 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

as divinations. In all the non-Christian world there 
is no record of a single infirmary for their protection 
or cure, except as the missionary gives it. Lepers 
meet a universal fate of isolation, with no hope, es- 
pecially after the disease is marked or known by others. 
It may be hidden by the poor victim until he has in- 
occulated many others, for leprosy, like many other 
transmittable diseases, is infectious rather than 
contagious. 

Blindness is one of the most universal ills of pagan 
lands. There are a million blind in India and China 
alone. Little babes are bound to the back or over the 
hip of the mother or a little sister, and carried about 
with their tender eyes exposed to the tropical sun. 
Uncleanness is the prolific source of blindness as of 
all other diseases. The habit of having the barber 
cleanse the eyes is, in China, the source of much trouble, 
for he wipes the tender organ with his dirty and con- 
taminated apron. Again, lack of precaution spreads 
the maladies. Necrosis of the feet, through foot- 
binding, causes untold agonies among China's girls. 
Suffering of all kinds drives multitudes to the relief 
that opium can give. The deadly pipe habit is growing 
rapidly in India. There are numerous other specific 
ills that space does not allow named, but whose pres- 
ence, and the devastation they wreak, can be laid up 
to habits of uncleanness and to ignorance of the nature 
of disease. Paganism has many diseases, but no ade- 
quate remedies for them. It has a penury as great 
as its other suffering, but it has neither hospital, 
scientific medicine, nor a charity that seeks the things 
of others as one's own. 

126 



BENEVOLENCE 

4. One Multiplied by a Thousand. 

In China there is but one scientific physician to 
every million souls. In the United States there is 
one to every six hundred. If there were but two doc- 
tors in Chicago, and one in St. Louis, we would have 
some idea of the needs of China and of the stupendous- 
ness of the medical missioner's work. In all paganism 
there is only one trained physician to every two and 
one-half million people. The average number of 
people within the radius of a mission station is prob- 
ably twenty-five thousand. There are eight hundred 
medical missionaries. Thus they are able to reach 
in some adequate way about twenty million people. 
Their work spreads far beyond their stations, however. 
Patients have come journeys of weeks to receive heal- 
ing. When Dr. Dye went to the Congo there was 
not another physician in a radius of eight hundred 
miles of Bolenge. Men came four hundred miles 
to his clinic. It is no uncommon thing for them to 
come from one hundred to one hundred and fifty 
miles. In China many instances are cited of them 
wheeling a member of the family a week's journey in 
the native barrow that they might get the benefit of a 
surgical operation. Three million patients are treated 
annually in the eleven hundred hospitals and dis- 
pensaries. A day's treatments will often include from 
one hundred to two hundred patients. One blind man 
who was cured went home and sent twelve blind neigh- 
bors to the physician. They came as of old, one lead- 
ing the other. Another put twenty into a boat and 
had them taken to his benefactor. Every man helped 

127 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

becomes an emissary of healing. The benevolence 
of the mission station reaches out for vast distances, 
and everywhere it goes it strikes a blow at the super- 
stition of demon worship and the black ignorance of 
the natives. 

The work done by some single medical missionaries 
and at certain hospitals all but defies credulity. The 
greatest practitioners and the most adequately 
equipped of the great hospitals at home do not equal it. 
In fifteen years Dr. Elizabeth Reifsnyder, of Shang- 
hai, ministered to more than 200,000 patients. Dr. 
Butchart, of Lu Cheo Fu, is at present administering 
35,000 treatments annually. Dr. John Kerr, of 
Canton, attended over 700,000 individuals in his work 
as a good physician in China, and performed 40,000 
operations. The two hospitals in Canton give 112,000 
treatments annually. In Swatow one missionary 
hospital receives into its beds 25,000 sick each year. 
The two Canton institutions have ministered to more 
than 1,250,000 persons since their establishment. 
But figures do not tell the story; they must be touched 
with imagination to convey any adequate picture 
of the work really done. One must see the long jour- 
neys by foot, boat, barrow, and mule-back to get to 
the missionary station, and think of the suffering en- 
dured under these primitive means of locomotion. He 
must picture the long and painful treatment endured 
often at the hands of the native quack before enough 
light reaches the poor sufferer to permit his prejudice, 
or that of his relatives, to send him to the foreigner. 
He must paint the scene in the waiting-room, the ul- 
cerated limbs, the great tumors, the swollen bodies, 

128 



BENEVOLENCE 

the blind eyes, the wan and ghastly yellow faces, the 
torture of little children, the patient suffering of aged 
women whose whole life has been one of such hardship 
that pain no longer puzzles them. There the rich 
sit in their silks by the side of the beggar in his rags, 
and all look with the one human hope to the door into 
which they will soon enter, half in fear, half in awe, 
for the doctor seems to many of them to be a miracle 
worker. 

But the medical man's work is not told even in 
the stupendous work he does with the multitudes that 
seek him, once he has won his way through the maze 
and mire of superstition. He goes into the broader 
field of social welfare and grapples with questions of 
sanitation, hygiene, and the establishment of govern- 
mental institutions for doing the work he is able only 
to begin doing. Dr. Berry taught a class of one hun- 
dred and twenty young men while doing the work of 
a strenuous medical missionary in Japan. Dr. Hep- 
burn was the founder of medical science in Japan, and 
added to his missionary labors, not only instruction for a 
future profession in the empire, but every form of phil- 
anthropic effort, and was decorated by the Mikado 
for his gifts to the social welfare of the nascent nation. 
Dr. Mackenzie founded the first medical school in 
China, at Tientsin. The mother of Li Hung Chang 
gave him the first thousand dollars ever given by a na- 
tive for Christian effort. The famous viceroy him- 
self aided in all Mackenzie's work. The college is 
to-day under native auspices and the pioneer mis- 
sionary's pupils are on its staff. The first lesson of 
the native doctor is to learn the location of the two 

9 129 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

hundred places where punctures may be made with 
his long needle, without killing. In the modern mis- 
sionary medical school he learns to perform surgical 
operations with skill. Japanese surgeons are among 
the famous operators of the world to-day, and China's 
will be in another generation. Dr. Tenny tells of 
thirty-two medical schools under missionary auspices. 
As in Japan, so it will soon be in China, the missionary 
will have established the idea of a scientific medical 
profession, and the nation will adequately endow its 
own schools for the training of a native profession in 
modern medicine and surgery. 

The medical missionary writes pamphlets and books 
for public instruction and scatters them broadcast. 
His field is wide for this kind of work, for the ills of 
the land are more than one-half preventable by ordi- 
nary cleanliness and hygienic living. He studies 
climatic and other diseases peculiar to his chosen 
field, and thus adds to the sum total of medical knowl- 
edge. He learns the pharmacopoeia of his district, 
that the people may have the benefit of cheaper medi- 
cines and the world the benefit of any discoveries that 
may be made. He prepares the public mind for deal- 
ing with epidemics and plagues, by lecturing and 
writing on ways to prevent them and means for dealing 
with them when they come. Governments listen to 
this instruction on such matters, and his power is 
multiplied by thousands. He establishes plague- 
camps and isolates all who will submit, that they may 
not be a menace to others, and may get the cure that 
pure air, water, and food will bring, together with 
his treatments. In Kashmir one physician sent the 

130 



BENEVOLENCE 

school boys out with tracts when the plague threatened, 
and they were purchased and heeded by hundreds. 
He introduces vaccination and has persuaded the 
government of Siam, through its enlightened late 
ruler, Chulalongkorn, to make it compulsory; to-day 
every child in Siam and Laos is vaccinated just as he 
is in America. One missionary station cared for more 
than 10,000, and Drs. Adamson and Braddock, of the 
Baptist Mission, superintended the vaccination of 
200,000 in one year. He introduces modern surgical 
instruments, and many of the better native doctors 
learn both to use them for simple operations . and to 
adopt his simpler remedies in their practice. Anti- 
septics, anesthetics, clinical thermometers, the art 
of nursing, and instruments for a more scientific diag- 
nosis are all contributed by him to the better care and 
cure of the multitudes who are tortured with many 
irritating little ills due to their unhygienic living, and 
by many major evils that grow out of neglect or mal- 
practice. In the late plague in China he induced the 
authorities to establish quarantines, and made inoc- 
culations that helped to get control of the situation. 
He convinces authorities of the benefits of the disin- 
fectant and the necessity of the sewer, and in every 
way multiplies his force by enlisting newly enlightened 
public sentiment. Such work is a task of a lifetime, 
but once done, it is done forever. 

The medical missionary is no longer needed in 
Japan, except as he is needed in our city slums and 
among the poor. In another generation or two this 
will be true of China and every land that has begun 
in earnest the work of public education.' It was a 

131 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

millennium before the church received the help of 
governments in the tasks of social welfare, such as 
equipping hospitals, the care of the poor, the building 
of asylums, and the instruction of the youth. She 
must yet do much of it, but the more rapidly society 
takes over the task, the better is the work of the church 
done in bringing in the Kingdom of God. The 'govern- 
ments in mission fields have the example of those of 
Christendom and will move more rapidly. Japan is 
in the lead, but there is no adequate institutional 
equipment there yet. China is beginning such work, 
and her statesmen acknowledge the debt of the nation 
to the missionary for showing them the way. Dr. 
John Kerr established the first infirmary for the insane 
in all China within the last decade. Dr. Berry is the 
father of prison reform in Japan; it is woefully inade- 
quate yet, but the work of native Christians, like 
Haro, Ito, Tomeoka, and Oinue, has done much. Dr. 
Murray established the first school for the blind in 
China ; his work is duplicated by several other missions 
to-day, but there is little by any but the Christians. 
In India, with its two hundred years of white rule, 
only one in twenty is yet reached by scientific medicine. 
Something more is needed than external rule. The 
missionary furnishes the desire and arouses the dis- 
content. The teacher is more powerful than the ruler. 

5. Conquest at the Point of the Lancet. 

"China was opened to the gospel at the point 
of the lancet," said the pioneer, Dr. Peter Parker. 
"A cure, to their eyes, is the proof of our apostleship," 
said the veteran Coillard. Dr. Allen was denied op- 

132 




TV' 



ative Medical Staff, Union Medical College, Peking. Il- 
lustrates the making of a native medical profession. 




T\ormitory, Union Medical College, Peking. Illustrates 
~^ Christian union in the social work of missions. 



BENEVOLENCE 

portunities to work for Korea until, when the crown 
prince had been wounded in a street riot, and the native 
physicians had failed to stop the flowing blood by 
stuffing in wax, he was called on as a last resort. He 
soon mended the torn artery, and from that day was 
given free scope for his work of healing both body and 
soul. After Dr. Mackenzie had cured the wife of 
Li Hung Chang, the port of Tientsin was open to the 
gospel, and the great viceroy became the friend of 
Christian benevolence. Dr. Livingstone probed his 
way through Africa, and was known far and wide in 
the heart of the Dark Continent as a miracle worker. 
Dr. Carr won his way into Persia when all others had 
been denied entrance. Kashmir was a closed land 
until Dr. Elmslie opened it at the point of his lancet. 
The story could be repeated on a hundred fields. "The 
greatest discoveries made in Africa were the roads 
to the hearts and confidences of the people," said 
Henry M. Stanley. The medical missionary touches 
them where they can understand. They know of 
their physical wounds and diseases, but are often be- 
numbed and unconscious of their moral troubles. The 
missionary's benevolence in dispensary, hospital, or- 
phanage, school, and by personal friendship not only 
interprets to them the real heart of the religion of 
Jesus, but makes them "potent forces, which are to- 
day influencing and winning the millions of the Far 
East to the realities and beneficent blessings of a new 
life," says Wm. Remfry Hunt in "Heathenism Under 
the Searchlight." John W. Foster, ex-Secretary of 
State, and noted diplomat, found in surgery "a ready 
means of overcoming prejudice and opposition." 

133 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

Opium smokers have been rescued to become effective 
workers. It is not easy to cure the opium habit. It 
is said that some of the older officials of China died 
in their efforts to obey the anti-opium edict. The 
physicians say that cures are seldom permanent if 
there be not a mighty purpose in the heart, such as 
only religion can be trusted to supply. So the faith 
becomes a part of the materia medica of the good 
physicians. Evangelist Shi is a notable example of 
an opium smoker made over into a winner of men. 
He was a great story teller, and, as is customary in 
China, related tales to crowds as a sort of monologue 
dramatist. For twenty years he smoked up his con- 
siderable earnings until rescued by Dr. Macklin. 
For another twenty years he has been an evangelist, 
with few equals in all China. Not all who come are 
cured, and not all who are helped become Christians, 
and not all who become members of the churches are 
heroes, but the many who are cured commend the re- 
ligion that sent them such a physician, and the many 
who are thus led to consider Christianity, and to adopt 
it, give a testimony that is unanswerable, and from 
among them come an array of heroic souls that is 
not equaled outside the mission field. "The aim of 
foreign missions is not to care for all the industrial, 
social, economic, and physical ills of the non-Chris- 
tian world, but to plant there the living seeds of the 
gospel of the incarnate God," says Robert E. Speer. 
"The gospel is to be the healing of the World." 

Philanthropic work opens the resources of the lands 
to which it ministers. Buddhism and Confucianism 
have both been stimulated to imitate the benevolent 

134 



BENEVOLENCE 

efforts of Christianity. They have opened schools 
where before they had none, and Buddhism to-day 
is copying the Young Men's Christian Association 
with a Young Men's Buddhist Association. Con- 
fucianism's "Halls of Learning" are, in places, taking 
over the attributes of Association work. The Chinese 
are building hospitals and endowing them here and 
there. The only difficulty they meet is that of ade- 
quate sympathetic interest on the part of physicians, 
for the missionary is not equipped with science merely, 
his sympathy is the better part of the cure. The rich 
are learning how to give to benevolent enterprises. 
A Hindu woman recently gave $60,000 for a hospital. 
Dr. Macklin has received several thousand dollars, 
one gift being that of $3,000 for his charity work. Li 
Hung Chang provided for the current expense account 
of the hospital and dispensary of Dr. Mackenzie at 
Tientsin, and wealthy Chinese gave $10,000 for its 
erection. Two years ago the officials at Changsha 
gave the Yale mission $1,400 for medical work. The 
late Dowager Empress of China gave $7,500 for 
the founding of a medical school. The Em- 
peror of Japan gave $5,000 for Young Men's 
Christian Association work during the Russo-Japa- 
nese war. The Crown Prince of Korea gave gen- 
erously for the Association building in Seoul, 
as did also Marquis Ito and his friends. These are 
but few examples. Even in Africa the King of Toro 
has built a hospital. They might be multiplied in- 
numerably. Some day Christianity will have so 
leavened the life of the lands to which it takes its mes- 
sage of sympathy and its hand of healing, that they 

135 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

will provide for their own poor and distressed ; in doing 
so it will have lifted the whole earth nearer the King- 
dom of God. "The movement led by Christianity 
has resulted in releasing thousands of the inmates of 
brothels, in an effective temperance crusade, and in the 
establishment of many benevolent institutions, such 
as the famous Ishii orphanage," says John Mott, 
in speaking of Japan. "The gospel of healing is 
one that makes its own way into the hearts of the 
people," said Wu Ting Fang, in commending medical 
missions. The medical missioner is given entrance 
into official circles, and all doors open most easily 
to him. He breaks down prejudice where it counts 
for most among peoples who are ruled from above and 
who accept the attitude of the ruler as a model for 
their own actions in things that relate to the new and 
the alien. He goes where it would be dangerous for 
any other man to go, because he takes healing, and all 
who suffer are grateful to him who gives relief. Thus 
his lancet opens the door and his message of life is 
listened unto and becomes a means of ingress to the 
evangelist and teacher. 

The fame of the medical missionary spreads far 
and wide. He opens hearts by his ministrations, and 
they open homes by their commendations. Dr. Mac- 
kay pulled 21,000 teeth in Formosa, and so relieved 
a common pain that whole villages were opened to his 
message. Dr. Macklin was traveling some days from 
home and where hostility for the foreigner was marked. 
He could get no entertainment and night was upon 
them. Mr. Cory, who was with him, was asked, by 
a man who happened to come along, the usual questions 

136 



BENEVOLENCE 

as to where he was from, etc. When he replied 
"Nankin," the man eagerly asked for Dr. Macklin. 
When told that he was in the party, this man eagerly 
invited them into his home, made them comfortable, 
and hastened to tell the neighbors. Through him 
many listened that night. He had been cured by the 
good physician many years before. Mobs have been 
quieted by such men, and lives saved. They have 
opened doors long before the evangelist's feet came to 
enter them. Bars of prejudice and superstition are 
broken. Dr. Clough baptized 10,000 after his famine 
relief work, though he had waited long for an opening. 
Even the most bigoted of Oriental Jews have yielded 
to the persuasion of the medical missioner. Islamic 
centers have not been able to deny him entrance, and 
their fatalism has had to surrender to the magic of 
his medicine. Among the Mohammedans he must 
lead the way, for their intolerance is great and all but 
Moslems are infidels and dogs, but they suffer and are 
healed, and a friendship thus won opens hearts closed 
by intolerance and dogmatic hate. Arabia is to-day 
calling for doctors to open closed doors with their 
lancets, and there is no place in the world where there 
is permanent denial to the good physician. His cause 
runs before him. Dr. Porter received patients from 
1,031 different towns and villages. One hospital in 
Bengal has had patients from 2,091 villages. They 
come to get personal benefit and go to carry a message 
of good will to all men. The hospital and the orphan- 
age have arms that reach out to distant places, and 
voices that speak in many tongues. Their evangel 
is self-transporting, and they make the voice of the 

137 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

heathen to praise Him who giveth all good. Whole 
villages are won to the message; entire tribes have been 
known to turn an open ear and an understanding mind, 
through the tidings carried by some who had been 
benefitted by Christian benevolence. 

There is no caste in the clinic. The silk-gowned 
aristocrat sits beside the ragged coolie, for pain makes 
all men of kin. The missionary refuses to recognize 
their artificial social lines in his ministrations of healing, 
whether it is of body or soul. The rich learn a fellow 
sympathy under his ministrations, and, in gratitude, 
aid him in the care of the poor. The native Christians 
become sympathetic and charitable under instruction 
in the arts of benevolence. The Great Physician 
commends unto them a spirit of fellow-help, and many 
become Good Samaritans to the need about them. 
That parable of neighborliness is often reacted in the 
mission field, for there the priest passes by the suffering 
and the despised convert turns aside to lend a hand. 
Ex-Secretary John Foster said that if not a single 
convert had been made in the past century, the social 
and moral benefits that the missionary had taken, 
in his practical benevolence on the field, would amply 
pay for all the blood and treasure it had cost. The 
friendly and sympathetic hand finds way into the 
closed homes of peoples who condemn their woman- 
kind to seclusion and ignorance and takes with it cheer 
and lessons for mind and hand, and above all, a touch 
of the larger life for the heart of the poor prisoners to a 
social custom. Here woman carries, as in no other 
sphere, the sweet sympathy of Christian womanhood. 

138 



BENEVOLENCE 

She takes the sunshine of a new hope inside with her, 
and not only cures bodies but enlightens eyes, and, in 
many cases, so breaks down prejudices that doors 
are opened and a little of the world let in. These ig- 
norant, custom-blinded, and prejudiced women are 
the main defenders of their own imprisonment and the 
chief obstacle often in the way of a greater freedom for 
caste and class. They are superstitious and intolerant 
of innovation. There are millions of them in Islam 
and in India and China, who would rather die than 
allow a male physician touch them. If the husband 
consents to accept this help, it is only because he is 
the one in a hundred who loves his wife or daughter 
enough to throw prejudice to the winds for the sake 
of saving a life. If he does not so love them he re- 
fuses, for wives are cheap and custom is a cruel task- 
master. " We dread your lady doctors," said a Hindu, 
11 they enter our homes, win the hearts of our women, 
and threaten the foundation of our religion." 

Medicine and religion are bound up together in 
the superstition of heathenism. The witch doctors 
of savagery are adepts in the arts of incantation, and 
their theology teaches that suffering is the result 
of spirit possession. The quackery of all the unscien- 
tific practice of paganism is mixed with superstition 
and religious charlatanry. It is fitting that religion 
should remedy the superstitious practices of char- 
latanry and carry a scientific medicament with its in- 
telligence and its liberty for the souls of men. Coming 
in the name of religion, the treatment is received with 
a faith that it might not otherwise receive, and the 

139 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

cure opens the way to combat superstition and false 
religious practices. Above all, it ministers in the 
name of Him who went about doing good, and so 
teaches the real art of Christian living as it carries 
the message of a Christian Savior. 



140 



CHAPTER IV 

Education: The Means of Progress 

1. The Missionary Contribution to Culture. 

The conquest of ideas can not be tabulated, but 
it is none the less sure; it is the undercurrent that 
irresistibly carries all that floats its seas. The surface 
play of politics makes for little compared to the deep 
influence of ideas. Rome conquered Greece politically, 
but Grecian ideas conquered Rome. The art, the 
universal language, the philosophy, and the culture 
of Rome was Grecian. We read the history of the 
Middle Ages in terms of war and diplomacy, but until 
we read the history of thought we do not understand 
that interesting period. We misjudge Christianity 
when we recount the surface play of ecclesiastical 
politics during the so-called Dark Ages, and charge it 
up to the religion of the Nazarene; it was a time of 
struggle between the political forms and crude customs 
of the old pagan civilization, and the startling innova- 
tions proposed by the new ideas of the Man of Galilee. 
Those ideas have not yet come into their own, but it 
is the philosophy of life and the vision of universal 
brotherhood they bring that is transforming the heart 
of the world and changing the currents of history. 

The missionary has ever been a pioneer in the con- 
quest of ideas. Wherever he has gone he has taken 

141 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

the schoolhouse. He has rooted out idolatry and su- 
perstition and banished dark ignorance with the light 
of his flaming torch. He has given the Scriptures to 
some five hundred tongues, and is pressing on to give it 
to all others, and to give with it the universal art of read- 
ing. He has written text-books, compiled dictionaries, 
constructed grammars, translated works of science, law, 
religion, political economy, history, and sociology, 
and counted every item of knowledge he could put 
into the vernacular of a people a distinct contribution 
to their welfare, and a step in bringing in the Kingdom 
of God. Robert Morrison not only translated the 
entire Bible into Chinese, but compiled an encyclo- 
pedic dictionary of their difficult language; either 
task would have been a monumental work for one man. 
William Carey translated the Scriptures and other 
religious material into more than thirty languages 
and dialects in India, and founded a college besides. 
Gutzlaff wrote sixty-one volumes in Chinese, two in 
Japanese, one in Siamese, five in Dutch, seven in Ger- 
man, and nine in English. The Chinese have been 
debtors to the most phenomenal literary labors of 
modern times. Morrison, besides the monumental 
labors mentioned above, wrote twenty-five volumes in 
Chinese, Milne gave them twenty-four, Legge twenty, 
and Faber twenty-seven, while Dr. Muirhead, in later 
times, gave them thirty books, Dr. McCartee thirty- 
four, and Dr. Edkins wrote fourteen in Chinese, seven 
in English, and one in Mongolian. Other fields have 
received like contributions in literature, and there 
is no phase of human knowledge that has not been 
given to the pagan world at Christian hands and given 

142 



EDUCATION 

as a glad contribution for their welfare. One mission 
press of China puts out 84,000,000 pages annually, 
and another in India more than 76,000,000 pages. 
The 160 mission presses in all the fields issue no less 
than 12,000,000 copies of various publications annu- 
ally, according to Dr. Dennis, and send out more than 
400,000,000 pages as Sibylline leaves to carry prophecy 
of the coming better day, when the knowledge of the 
Lord shall cover the earth as the waters the sea. 
Bibles and parts of the Bible are annually distributed 
by hundreds of thousands, and in all the older mission- 
ary fields are now gladly purchased by the people. 
This general diffusion of knowledge among the reading 
minority has stimulated greatly the love of learning 
among all the people, and substituted a live and modern 
view of the world for the ancient traditions. It has 
vastly aided China, Japan, and Korea to turn their 
faces from the sunset of the past to the sunrise of the 
future. It is helping to put a historical perspective 
back of Hindu speculation, and to train the Indian 
mind toward practical and serviceable knowledge. 
The missionary sets ideas to work, and, increasing 
modern knowledge, banishes ancient superstitions, 
and turns the pagan mind from its distorted concep- 
tion of natural phenomena to a more scientific concep- 
tion of nature, and thus sets him on the road to open- 
mindedness and progress. 

When the first Irish missionaries set out on their 
journeys to the wild men of Scotland, Northumbria, 
Friesland, and Germany, they took with them the 
fundamentals of education. In Ireland, St. Patrick's 
Christian settlements had been communities for in- 

143 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

struction. Columba founded a school with his church 
at Iona. Boniface's monasteries in Germany were also 
schools. The Jesuits originated the idea of separate 
Christian communities in their "Reductions" in Para- 
guay, and carried the idea into the missions of Cali- 
fornia; in them they taught the converts the rudiments 
of learning and gave an industrial training. Duff be- 
came the founder of the modern school system in 
India. Verbeck established the first college in Japan, 
and is the real founder of the Imperial University. 
Dr. Murray was invited from America by the Japanese 
Government to establish its modern school system. 
Dr. Martin has been justly called the father of modern 
education in China. Stewart, of Lovedale, set the 
type of educational institution for savage Africa, the 
inspector of schools for South Africa saying, "A visit 
to Lovedale would convert the greatest skeptic regard- 
ing the value of native education." The missionary 
is the real founder of modern education in all the non- 
Christian lands. He sows the seed, sets the ideal, in- 
spires the organization, and generally manages the 
beginnings of governmental efforts, besides actually 
educating the leaders in his own institutions. 

The non-Christian world is an ignorant world. 
Two-thirds of humanity can not read and write, and 
the most of that illiterate population is non-Christian. 
In India there are 278,000,000 illiterates, or 891 to the 
thousand, while in the United States there are only 
65 to the thousand. In Japan only the upper classes 
could read and write before Western civilization 
entered. All Africa is black and sodden in ignorance, 
and, except where the missionary has taught them, 

144 



EDUCATION 

do not so much as know that writing is possible. China 
has long honored her literati, but has had no public 
school system that reached the masses, and has left 
her womankind in almost total ignorance. Korea's 
education began within the missionary era of her 
present inner transformation. Confucianism and 
Brahmanism both possess educational ideas, but both 
make it the vehicle for turning the face to the past, 
and crystalize social custom and forbid progress. Con- 
fucianism is democratic in that it opens the way for 
any boy to become learned if his parents can purchase 
the instruction, but it provides no universal education 
and it instructs in the classics instead of the sciences, 
and trains the mind by verbal memory rather than in 
logical thinking. Its classical writings are morally 
pure, even more so than those of the ancients we teach 
to our Western youth, and they, at least, are set into 
the circle of the national life, but they give little prac- 
tical knowledge, and they bound China to the mummies 
of a past. Brahmanism forbids instruction to any 
but the caste, and thus denies education her right to 
remake society; she makes learning consist in subtle 
speculation and knows no practical arts. Buddhism 
is the most liberal and progressive of the non-Chris- 
tian faiths, but even she has never reared a public 
school system, made learning popular, or educated 
women, and her desire to escape from the toil of things 
material destroys all desire to know more of the prac- 
tical world. In Burma, Siam, and Tibet, where Bud- 
dhism has been kept purest and has been regnant for 
centuries, she has never educated the populace. Islam 
led the world in the gift of culture for four centuries, 
10 145 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

but had no power to overcome her own limitations, 
and her world to-day is one of blind ignorance, fatalism, 
and superstition. 

The East is awakening to the advantages of educa- 
tion. They have discovered there is no hope of prog- 
ress except through the school as the vehicle. There 
are 500,000 youth in the high schools, colleges, and uni- 
versities of Asia to-day. One-fifth of all of them are 
in the missionary institutions for higher learning; 
this measures somewhat the part the missionary is 
playing in the educational renaissance of the East. 
But no government, with the single exception of Japan, 
has yet arisen to the situation and furnished adequate 
instruction for all. In China the most remarkable 
transformation in the history of the world is taking 
place. Her temples are being turned into school- 
houses, and her ancient examination stalls have been 
torn down in favor of modern learning and more ap- 
proved and efficient civil service equipment. Her 
officials have urged the people to give their offering 
for the dead to the schools ; it would amount in Shang- 
hai alone to $350,000 annually. In Tientsin the 
government has forbidden such gifts and has estab- 
lished modern schools from primary to university. 
Her projected educational system will establish a 
university in every province, a high school in every 
considerable town, an elementary school in every 
village, and crown all with magnificent graduate and 
technical universities. But to-day she is able to fur- 
nish schooling to only one in from every forty to fifty- 
five of her youth, and has as yet only a few of the mil- 
lion teachers it will take to instruct all her young people. 

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EDUCATION 

In India, with the English Government's universal 
school system, there is only one in every fifty-seven 
under instruction, and the missionaries are educating 
one-third of all who attend college. In all the non- 
Christian world not more than one-tenth of the popu- 
lation can find a school open for their children, and of 
that tenth the great mass are not inspired with a de- 
sire for education. Tradition surrenders slowly, ex- 
cept it be given a mighty dynamic within. 

The missionaries are to-day instructing nearly 
1,500,000 youth in their 25,000 institutions of learning. 
Some of the large institutions of higher learning are 
under missionary auspices. In India they have 72 
high schools, colleges, and universities with more 
than 250 students each, and there are 17 colleges 
with a total attendance of more than 17,000 stu- 
dents, several of them with from 1,400 to 1,800 apiece. 
St. Peter's College at Tanjore, Madras, has educated 
more than 5,000 young men; Assiut College, in Egypt, 
has graduated 2,000, and St. John's, in Rangoon, 
Burmah, has taught more than 12,000. The United 
Presbyterian mission in Egypt conducts 150 schools, 
with an attendance of 16,000 students, one-fourth of 
whom are Moslems. In Persia there are 5,000 in the 
mission schools, and in some of them one-half the 
pupils are Moslems. The Syrian Protestant College 
at Beirut, Syria, has 850 students and a faculty of 
seventy-two men; it is making the leaders for all that 
territory and is finely equipped. Robert College at 
Constantinople is one of the most remarkable of ex- 
isting educational institutions. Prof. William Ram- 
sey says he found their graduates over all Turkey and 

147 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

the Balkans, and that everywhere they are men of 
integrity, patriotism, and breadth of culture. It was 
the graduates of Roberts that led in the emancipation of 
Bulgaria. Urumia College bids fair to become to Persia 
what Roberts has been to the Balkans and Turkey. 
In all Turkey there are 700 schools, with 41,000 stu- 
dents, largely under Congregational auspices, and they 
have furnished the new blood and the modern ideas, 
in no small part, for the remaking of the empire. In 
Japan the missionaries are now confining their educa- 
tional work to that which the government does not 
adequately supply, i. e., kindergartens and high 
schools. The Doshisha was the pioneer of Christian 
schools there and graduated many of the leaders of 
modern Japan. Its alumni have recently raised 
$100,000 for its further endowment. St. John's Col- 
lege in Shanghai is one of the solidest educational 
institutions in all the East. Madras University is 
a great school, with over 1,700 students. In Africa 
the Blantyre Mission has fifty-seven schools, with 
4,000 pupils, and the Livingstone Mission has 207 
schools, with 16,000 students. In Uganda there are 
60,000 under instruction, and it is a disgrace not to 
be able to read. These are but a few of the large num- 
ber that might be named. 

Some of the great student centers of the world 
are now to be found in the Eastern capitals. Tokio 
claims first place, with 50,000, while Calcutta has 
20,000, Peking has 17,000, and Cairo has more than 
10,000. The tendency is for the masses of students 
to gather in these centers in each country. The great 
question of the day is regarding the moral quality that 

148 



EDUCATION 

these students will take away from the colleges with 
them. Herbert Spencer said, "The idea that mere 
education is a panacea for political evils is a delusion. " 
He was introduced at a dinner given him by the notable 
literary men and educators of New York by William 
M. Evarts, who, as toastmaster, said, out of compliment 
to the great compiler and apostle of knowledge, that 
the attainment and diffusion of knowledge was the 
promise and the hope of America. He replied that 
he was embarrassed to have to take issue with one 
who had given him so kindly an introduction, but 
that it was not knowledge but character that was the 
hope and promise of America. Premier Katsura, of 
Japan, wrote President Harada, of the Doshisha Uni- 
versity, congratulating him upon the manner in which 
the college had stamped character upon the young men 
of Japan, and said, "May it become a citadel of cul- 
ture." In India even the government officials acknowl- 
edge the inefficiency of the national schools in the 
training of character. Count Okuma has been es- 
pecially emphatic in his apostleship of the idea that 
character must be given with education or it is a failure, 
and has ever commended both the Christian schools 
and Christian ethics as the true source of it. The 
school of a non-Christian land does not have the Chris- 
tian for a teacher as it usually does in America and 
Britain, and education all too often means no social 
conscience, but only a means for individual preferment. 
As a consequence, the educated man is not less li- 
centious or corrupt in office, but more artful, and, 
without social conscience, he fails to uplift his kind. 
"What you would put into the life of a nation, put 

149 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

into its schools," says an old German proverb. All 
the East is awakening to the need of a high moral 
tone in education. One-half of the 100,000 young men 
in the higher schools of learning conducted by the mis- 
sionaries will give themselves to teaching. 

2. Creating a Leadership. 

The Christian community becomes a leaven in the 
midst of the pagan community; its ideals gradually 
take hold, and many who do not confess the faith 
come to practice the precept. Keshub Chunder Sen, 
the founder of the Brahmo Somaj of India, was led 
by the teachings of Christianity. Mozoomdar was con- 
verted by Christianity, and, while unable to unite 
with a divided church, gave his great influence to 
Christian morals. Many of the leaders of Japan and 
China have accepted the morals of Christianity and 
plead with their youth to do the same. The late 
progressive king of Siam was educated by a missionary. 
But it is not the leaders alone who are lifted up by 
contact with Christian thought; it enters into the cus- 
toms of the common people and raises the standards 
of living and the grade of common intelligence. There 
is no influence so pervasive as that of personal contact, 
and every true native Christian touches many of his 
neighbors. Thus there comes a leadership of ideals 
and ideas that is pervasive and elevates all living. 

Nothing more fatal could happen than for a people 
to accept the externals of Christianity without getting 
its vital life. They would have thrown away what 
discipline their old faith gave them, and taken none 
of the moral sanctions of the new in its stead. Here 

150 



EDUCATION 

lies the danger of Western innovation and material 
advantage impinging upon the culture of the East and 
the barbarous life of savagery. Education assimilates 
the outward to the inner and fits a man to enjoy the 
greater material advantages of civilization and freedom 
from the old bondage, without losing himself in a 
riot of riches that he does not know how to use. "A 
change of mind is needed as well as a change of heart.' ' 
Mere conversion is not enough; the convert must be 
instructed in the things of the new life. The danger 
of education in Asia is that it will fail to give character 
to the leaders of the next generation. The destruction 
of the old superstition is followed by a reaction against 
religion. Such was the case in Japan, where a smat- 
tering of scientific knowledge all too often meant the 
danger of a little learning. Most of the 40,000 stu- 
dents in the higher government schools of learning 
in India are skeptics in regard to all religion. No 
educated man is an idolater, and all too often he is a 
materialist, pure and simple. It is fortunate for India 
that every third college man is under Christian in- 
struction. 

Missions have played one of their greatest roles 
in the furnishing of leadership for the awakened nations 
of the East. William Elliot Griffis says that previous 
to 1890 most of the leaders of new Japan had been 
educated in the mission schools; that fact may account 
for the lack of excesses in the revolution. One-half 
the mission students of China take up teaching or 
direct Christian service, and their influence in temper- 
ing the new era will be recognized by the leaders of 
new China. In Japan no less than twenty of the editors 

151 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

of the leading dailies are Christian men, while the 
number of Christians in Parliament and the leading 
offices of state is out of all proportion to the number of 
church members in the empire. Duff said, "The real 
reformers of Hindustan will be the well qualified 
Hindus." The Director of Public Instruction for 
India said, twenty years ago, that at the present rate 
the Christian community of India would ultimately 
furnish most of the professional leadership of the nation, 
and that they bid fair to become the industrial leaders 
as well. An instance of their progress in leadership 
in China is given by the Commercial Press of Shanghai. 
It was organized by Christian young men, graduates 
of mission schools, and took for its avowed purpose the 
creation of a Christian enterprise on Christian prin- 
ciples, and was inspired by the opportunity to serve 
the nation through furnishing good literature. To- 
day it does a business of a million a year, furnishes 
70% of all the books printed in China, keeps the 
Lord's Day, and is one of the most reputable and hon- 
orable business enterprises to be found anywhere. 
The literature of modern Japan is predominantly from 
the hands of men educated in the mission schools. 
If the church is to be strong on the mission field, 
it must have an educated leadership, and that leader- 
ship must be increasingly native. No foreigner can 
appeal to a people as can their own leaders. Those 
missions that have paid all but exclusive attention 
to evangelism and have neglected education are to-day 
suffering for leadership, while those that both evan- 
gelized and educated are growing with increasing mo- 
mentum. The London Missionary Society is notable 

152 



EDUCATION 

among the latter; it is to-day multiplying its native 
staff much more rapidly than that of its foreign leaders, 
and reaping consequent benefits in self-supporting 
churches, Christianized communities, and an efficient 
public leadership for all social advancement. In Japan 
15% of the graduates of mission colleges have gone 
into teaching or direct Christian service, 5% have 
taken government positions, 30% have gone into 
business and the professions, while 35% are pursuing 
advanced studies. In China the mission student is 
handicapped at present by governmental regulation. 
China is yet afraid lest foreign instruction means 
the domination of the alien, and compels all govern- 
ment students to bow to the tablet of Confucius and 
forbids any to vote who are not from government 
schools. These fears will soon subside, and, as in 
Japan, the Christian young men of education will 
exert a wide influence in the making of the new China. 
There is also a great handicap to the Chinese church 
in its claims on its graduates for direct Christian serv- 
ice. They are accused tauntingly of " eating the for- 
eigner's rice," are compelled to work for from one-third 
to one-twentieth what commercial and government 
service pays, and, in some instances, ignorantly classed 
with the priestly element and despised accordingly. 
That one-half enter either direct Christian service or 
teaching, and thus become the real leaven of the new 
order, is a magnificent tribute to their spirit of self- 
sacrifice and their love of fellow-man. The new pa- 
triotism in China exalts service of the nation to an 
almost religious enthusiasm, but the missionary is 
even less concerned about making officials than he is 

153 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

about furnishing the educators and social welfore 
exponents of the new era ; for the men who create the 
ideals and inculcate the ideas for the new era will most 
effectually mould it. The church in every mission field 
needs men who will interpret Christian principles into 
the indigenous thought of the people. To that end the 
missionary candidates of to-day should be well in- 
structed in pedagogy, and know how to impress the 
mind of the native student with principles without 
destroying his personality as a native. The mission 
school is vastly superior to any other on the field, in 
both morals and pedagogical efficiency, but the latter 
needs further strengthening. Most of the higher 
schools of learning are sadly undermanned. What 
they are able to do with their inadequate staffs is one 
of the marvels of missions, but if the church would 
rise to her opportunities, she will supply adequate 
faculties and hasten the day when Christianity will 
have both a competent leadership for herself in the 
field, and also multiply her power to furnish thoroughly 
Christianized leaders for all spheres of life. 

Educated youth make the morrow. In our own 
country the 1% that takes a full college course occupy 
70% of the positions of influence. How much more 
will it be so in nations in the making? The education 
of the many lifts immeasurably the whole standard 
of living. The missionary generally has to begin with 
the lower classes in his schools as in his churches, but 
education makes these dispossessed of one generation 
the leaders of the next. Efficiency will eventually 
take command, even though the odds be great. The 
educational ideal of life leavens the whole social life 

154 



EDUCATION 

of a people. It establishes a democracy and destroys 
caste. In India to-day there are 170,000,000 bound 
by the thongs of caste. In all paganism womankind 
is socially of lower caste. Most religions stand for 
a sort of caste preferment for their adherents. Mo- 
hammedanism constitutes itself a proud caste wherever 
it exists. Brahmanism confines its glories to the few 
who are born within its sacred precincts. Those 
educated in the writings of Confucius are a select 
class in China. A Brahman of note said before an 
audience in Allahabad, " I am a Brahman of the Brah- 
mans, and of the most orthodox school, but I must 
confess that the way in which Christianity has raised 
the Pariahs of Madras is beyond all praise and puts 
me to shame as a Hindu." The Christian patriot 
of Madras says, "The Christians look back to the era 
when a few Galilean peasants turned the world upside 
down and shook the ancient fabric of civilization, and 
then look forward to when the emancipated Pariah 
shall stand amongst those redeemed by Christ from 
every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation." 
Idleness is no longer dignified, work becomes respect- 
able, and it is no longer said as in a Hindu proverb, 
"He who reads must be waited upon by him who does 
not." Self-reliance and confidence take hold of the 
lowly and men are made potential with a new power. 
A new environment is gradually created, and in it 
the multitudes who follow are given a larger oppor- 
tunity. "It must be remembered," said Gladstone, 
"that the moral standards of individuals are fixed, 
not alone by their personal convictions, but by the 
principles, the traditions, and the habits of the society 

155 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

in which they live and below which it is a point of 
honor, as well as of duty, not to sink. A religious 
system is only, then, truly tested when it is set to re- 
form and to train, on a territory of its own, great masses 
of mankind." With this challenge, Christianity goes 
to educate the leadership of the nations, confident that 
what has come to pass in the West will also come to 
pass in the East, and unto the uttermost parts of the 
earth in the course of time, and that all men will be 
elevated into high planes of a civilized life as the leaven 
of knowledge and of righteousness runs through the 
whole measure. 

3. Turning Liabilities into Assets. 

"As a pagan, the Indian was a liability; as a Chris- 
tian he is becoming an increasing asset," says a Ca- 
nadian Government Blue Book. Practically all mis- 
sionary work among the Indians has been conducted 
with industrial training. The success of Metlakahtla, 
and such superbly successful efforts to create a higher 
type of Indian community, has been based upon the 
training of hand with head and heart. William Dun- 
can has made Metlakahtla a type of peace and pros- 
perity, such as few pioneer white communities can 
show. He found the Tsimshian Indians of British 
Columbia a savage, degraded tribe. They gave him 
scant courtesy and put him in grave danger often. 
After a patient effort he won their confidence, induced 
them to give up drunkenness, and organized them into 
an industrial community. It became a model of 
peaceful, industrious, Christian neighborliness, and 
is to-day one of the shining examples of missionary 

156 





TW] 






Class in Carpentry — Rhodesia, Africa. Illustrating the 
practical manner in which the mission school founds edu- 
cation in the practical arts. 




r^otton Weaving in India, illustrating how the missionary 
helps the people to help themselves. 



EDUCATION 

power to create a civilization. The primitive man has 
little sense of precision or accuracy, and less of logical 
thinking. The watch and the mirror excite his wonder, 
if indeed they do not arouse his apprehension lest they 
be possessed of demons; but it never occurs to him to 
make inquiries as to their construction until the white 
man gives him the lesson that unburdens his concep- 
tion of magic and instills the first ideas of science. 
In the native mind, idea and action are not always 
coupled together. The reality of a thing and the 
thought concerning it are not connected. The Hindu 
may possess the finest of speculative intellects, but he 
can not invent a harvesting machine; so, too, he may 
know all the doctrine and not think of his obligation 
to live it. Character consists not in knowledge, but 
in doing what one knows to do. Stewart, of Lovedale, 
said that the native " confounds instruction and educa- 
tion. " He may learn all the lessons, but not practice 
any of them. What he learns must be assimilated 
into character and personality. He must be not a 
hearer only, but a sincere doer of the word. 

The catch -word of present-day pedagogy is, "no 
impression without expression." It is dangerous to 
know much and to feel much without doing much. 
It is of such stuff that hypocrites are made. The mis- 
sionary finds a people in Africa and other barbarous 
lands that are idle and without ambition. In the 
Malay States it is impossible to hire the natives to 
work. A shake of the tree and he has fruit, a line 
into the sea and he has fish, a bit of beaten bark and his 
wife has him a garment; he builds his house of a few 
bamboo, and may while the sultry days away with 

157 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

games and the chewing of beetle-nut, so why should 
he work; money would only buy things he does not 
need, and he has no ambition to raise his standard 
of life. In contrast to this is the report from the 
interior of Africa, where Dr. Laws of the Livingstonia 
Mission tells of thousands of formerly idle, half- 
starved Tongas now in the employ of the African 
Lakes Co., and even of hundreds of the wild and war- 
like Angoni, formerly contemptuous of aught but the 
raid and bloodshed, having become industrious and 
peaceable in their habits, all through industrial train- 
ing in that mission. The Catholic Bishop, Casar- 
telli, says that their experience in North Africa is, "that 
without some preliminary training in habits of work 
and industry, which are at least the rudiments of 
civilization, religious or moral teaching has little if 
any moral effect." It trains the constructive or crea- 
tive powers and develops faculties that book instruc- 
tion does not develop ; it stimulates the motor activities 
and cultivates the inventive faculties; it gives re- 
sourcefulness and a sense of possession that arouses 
the instincts for accumulation, without which man 
will not provide for the morrow. "The native thinks 
little of the future," says the Principal of Blytheswood. 
It is a feast or a famine with him. He gets a regard 
for work, whereas he has despised it. The luxury of 
idleness is an ideal of savagery. Industrial instruction 
trains his mind in observation, precision, accuracy, 
and creation ; it panoplies him with those fundamentals 
of civilization — thrift, industry, and a desire to do 
things. There is an economic basis of civilization. 
The pagan peoples are poverty-stricken because they 

158 



EDUCATION 

have so little creative power and because they have 
little idea of conservation. 

Civilization arouses new wants. The artisan is 
necessary to progress. The native must begin where 
he is, and build step at a time. He can not lift him- 
self with book education if it makes him abhor his 
kind, or does not fit him to do the next best thing for 
his people. The Livingstonia Mission in Central 
Africa gives its industrial instruction in houses built 
of the same material its students will have to use in 
their future work in the village. It aims to use the 
native tools and such improvements on them as can 
be made, together with instruments that the native- 
trained artisan can make for himself, in order that 
he may not be a workman without tools. European 
tools are better, but they are expensive and remote, 
and the aim is to make all skill acquired practicable 
to the immediate situation in Central Africa. Some 
missions have erred in training lads to become skilled 
in things that were not in demand in their country, 
and thus left them skilled but without a job. Hampton 
and Tuskegee furnish the models for modern industrial 
mission schools. Their ideal is to fit the student to 
meet the actual conditions as they exist about him, 
and to better them in all practical ways; to make 
every graduate capable of earning a livelihood for him- 
self and family, among his own people and by minis- 
tering to their welfare, and to give every one a desire to 
do actual labor. The first pupils in the African mis- 
sions were taunted by the proud idlers, who lived by 
the work of their wives, with ''selling their skins for 
money;" but the brigand was turned into an honest 

159 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS* 

worker and industry replaced the slave raid. The 
native hut was built higher and wider and the new 
economic factor put on clothing in place of his old 
war paint and tattooing. The crooked path that had 
been made by generations of savage feet was broadened 
into a roadway, and oxen were hitched to the loads 
that women and bare-backed men had been accustomed 
to carry. 

A literary training may "make drones where 
workers are needed." It is a missionary experience 
that the native may be educated out of his environ- 
ment by being taught as the American school teaches. 
There must ever be teachers, preachers, and clerical 
workers trained, but even they will be all the better 
trained by having wholesome education in the arts 
and crafts. The old Jewish custom would be good 
for the latest civilization. Every person would do 
well to have a trade, and if there be any truth in John 
Ruskin's idea that there was no guarantee of whole- 
some character except one had toiled with his hands, 
it is dangerous to not have been through the discipline 
of industrial labor. The native who is sent abroad 
is liable to return with a contempt for his lowly breth- 
ren, and to be so educated above their manner of life 
that he can not articulate with it sufficiently to help 
them. 

The late Charles Cuthbert Hall was convinced 
that industrial training was as beneficial as either 
evangelistic or medical missions in India. The Hindu 
has some arts that are rare, but in the best of them 
he uses the most primitive methods and wastes untold 
strength. The practical arts are not well developed, 

160 



EDUCATION 

and the resources of the land and the people are not 
more than touched. The government is doing much 
to develop material resources, but until the people 
are made resourceful the greatest mine of livelihood 
is untouched. The native convert is liable to be 
ostracized and cast out, both from the common fund 
of his family and from the trade in which his guild 
works. The industrial school makes him self-sup- 
porting and self-reliant, and builds up a self-sustaining 
Christian community. The orphan children would 
be mere beggars and parasites on society if they were 
trained in mind and not in hand as well. The govern- 
ment schools have educated so many for clerical posi- 
tions that desks are overcrowded; the great need of 
the land is for practical workers who can build up the 
solid foundations of life in character and economic 
resourcefulness, and break down the paralyzing system 
of caste that lays its hand on industry, as well as on 
all social life. In China the people are industrious, 
perhaps the most hard-working people in the world, 
but they use the tools of the times of Abraham. Their 
farms are tilled with a stick, sharpened with a flat 
piece of iron, a club hoe, and a hook that serves for 
reaper and general utility instrument. In the African 
industrial missions the steel plowshare was intro- 
duced and literally thousands of them have been 
adopted. "Why, they do the work of ten women," 
said the wondering natives. Chinese industries need 
modernization, and the adaptation of modern arts 
to native thrift puts the native Christian to the fore 
as a leader in his community. Dr. Osgood tells how 
he led a native carpenter into the better way through 
11 161 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

the use of a brace and bit. The appalling poverty 
and the barren hardness of daily living among China's 
millions is due, not to lack of native resources, but to 
lack of native resourcefulness. China can not build 
an enduring civilization of the new order without 
a solid foundation in the industrial arts and a rise in 
the standard of life among her masses. When the 
missionary trains the hands he trains in character 
and makes the individual able to lift his share in the 
betterment of society. Industrial missions do not 
play the part in China that they do in Africa, or even 
in India, but they have a large part to play in the 
educational work of the missionary. In Japan the 
thorough modernization of all life leaves the industrial 
mission pretty much the same function that it plays 
in education at home. The missionary has found 
it very necessary and useful in the orphanage, and 
wherever he offers any schooling in the common grades 
it becomes an integral part of good instruction. In 
Africa the industrial mission is the true foundation 
of all education and progress. When Dr. James Stew- 
art proposed that the most fitting memorial to David 
Livingstone was a mission that would instruct the 
natives in the foundations of industrial order and use- 
fulness and make Christians of them, he solved Africa's 
educational problem. The solution now only needs 
pushing on to the limits of its possibilities, and to the 
shores of the continent. Blantyre, Lovedale, Blythes- 
wood, Livingstonia, and many others, are giving the 
example. It is safe to say that there is practically 
no mission in all Africa that does not use the industrial 
method, and in them tens of thousands are receiving, 

162 



EDUCATION 

or will receive, the foundations for a new and better 
era. Civilization arouses new wants, and the mis- 
sionary fails if he does not put into the hands of the 
new disciple the means of supplying them. In Central 
Africa there is a settlement of native Chrsitians that 
has carved out a community life by the arts of their 
hands and through the desires of their Christianized 
hearts. A few of them first went off into the woods 
alone, and others were welcomed as they came. It is 
a place of peace and order, and even the Moslems have 
been coming to share in the new and better way. In 
India Christian communities of Pariahs have been 
established, and the poor outcast has become a self- 
respecting freeman, worthy, industrious, and self- 
supporting, under his own initiative. 

4. Teaching the Mothers of the Race. 

"Since the world began it was never known that 
a woman could read," said the people of South India, 
when the first school for girls was opened. The non- 
Christian world has no system of instruction for its 
womankind. One of the most startling innovations 
of the missionary was the school for girls. The Hindu 
said, "You had as well try to teach the monkeys to 
read;" the Moslem said the same, only used the mule 
for his comparison. The savage marveled that the 
missionary talked and ate with his wife and made the 
ox do her work. England opened schools for India 
in 1854, but in that sad land only one out of two- 
hundred women above twenty-five years of age can 
read or write. In China not more than one woman 
out of three-thousand can read or write. In Japan 

163 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

the modern educational system is educating the girls, 
but takes few above what we know as the "common 
school" grades. The government provides no uni- 
versities for women, and the three normal schools it 
does support cut off one year from the work given 
men. There is a great university for women in Tokio, 
with 1,000 students, but it was founded and is managed 
by a Christian scholar. In India the Hindu girls go 
to school, if at all, only until they are about eleven or 
twelve years old ; they are then taken out to be married. 
There is only one girl out of every five hundred students 
in the high schools, and of the 112 women in the arts 
colleges, forty-three are Christians and thirty-three 
Parsis. In the primary grades the girls furnish only 
one pupil in seventeen, and only four out of every 
thousand of school age attend school at all; in the 
Central Provinces even that number must be divided 
by two. In comparison with America, only one 
Hindu girl goes to school to every seven hundred of 
our daughters. 

In all pagan lands the women are the citadels of 
religious superstition; their ignorance and prejudice 
and natural religious interests make them such. The 
conservative men of pagan lands fear the education 
of their women as no other modern innovation. It 
means the overthrow of their ancient prerogatives 
of absolute lordship and a readjustment of the family 
life that spells revolution to the social order. Woman 
is an inferior creature, and all creation will be over- 
thrown if she be not kept such. Hinduism and Bud- 
dhism teach that she has no salvation except she be 
born again as man; education teaches her that there 

164 



EDUCATION 

is a worth in her own soul. The Chinese women re- 
plied to early missionaries that it was no use to teach 
them, they had no souls. Even Burman women, the 
freest of all, have little education, though they possess 
an initiative that makes them superior to their hus- 
bands in much, and, when educated in Christian 
schools, acquire a grace and poise that makes them 
the equal of their Western sisters. There is no eleva- 
tion of race possible, unless its mothers are elevated; 
one had as well expect water to rise above its own 
sources. Woman becomes the citadel of religious 
morality once she is Christian ; the natural refinements 
of her nature and the mother instinct for the preserva- 
tion of her young make her so. "There is not a woman 
in Christendom that is not under infinite obligations 
to the Christ," says A. McLean. If women were 
sensitive to the benefits that Christianity confers 
upon their sex, they would not only outnumber the 
men in the churches, they would so train their sons 
in the love of Christianity, for their mother's sake, 
that multitudes more of them would pay a juster 
tribute of respect to the emancipator of their mothers. 
When Mrs. Marshman founded the first school 
for women in India more than a century ago, she drove 
the thin end of the wedge into the bed rock of heathen- 
ism. India has produced some of the most remarkable 
women of the last and present generations; but every 
one of them has been educated in mission schools, 
or has come under the influence of missionaries. "For 
a woman to be without ability is her virtue," was a 
Chinese proverb, but a Chinese woman's journal 
to-day declares, "The woman who remains in ignorance 

165 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

wrongs not only herself, but her family and her coun- 
try." "What women these Christians have," cried 
the teacher of Chrysostom of old, and Mozoomdar 
wrote the same back to India when he attended the 
Congress of Religions in Chicago. In Cairo there 
was recently held a great mass meeting of women 
at which a princess made the leading address. They 
demanded that the harem be overthrown, the veil 
discarded, and that they have the right to give their 
own hands in wedlock. The schools for girls have 
not wrought in vain in Egypt; even men who were 
bitterly opposed to them now desire their graduates as 
wives for their sons. The Moslem girls of Syria were 
formerly married at the age of twelve, but the Christian 
school has so wrought among them that few are now 
married before fifteen, while the Christian girls wait 
until they are eighteen or twenty ; thus is given another 
concrete instance of the social leaven at work in the 
mass, through the influence of a minority who are 
under thralldom to the principles of the gospel. In 
Siam the Minister of Education said that it was through 
the influence of missionary schools, and the work of 
Christian women in teaching girls, that schools for 
them were founded in Siam and supported by the 
government. In Korea the rapidly growing Chris- 
tian community can not get enough teachers to in- 
struct all their children; for the new found faith opens 
their natural hearts, and they desire all their children 
educated without reference to sex. In China one-half 
of the Christian women learn to read, though they 
are not converted until mature. "Your Bible must 
have been written by a woman," said one of them, 

166 



EDUCATION 

"it says so many kind things about women." The 
missionary does not confine his instruction to the 
school room; the church itself becomes a school and 
the lesson is carried into the home itself by the hands 
of those faithful women who do the effective evangel- 
ism of home visitation. Mrs. Montgomery says the 
"woman's club" seems to follow Christianity all over 
the earth and tells of one in Portuguese West Africa, 
to which scores of the native women come, some walking 
as much as one hundred miles to attend. They talk 
over all those home problems that women in our own 
land talk over when they come together in their 
mothers' meetings, and no more effective civilizing 
work could be done than that of guiding their minds in 
the discovery of humane ways of caring for their chil- 
dren, and in teaching them that cleanliness which is 
next to Godliness. 

The education that is given on the mission field 
must be of the practical sort which fits the pupil 
to live in the midst of her native surroundings, and 
to grapple with local problems. The missionary does not 
build a great church edifice after the type of modern 
Western architecture, and stand up in it to preach to 
a people who have never learned what a church edifice 
is; he begins at their hearts and leads them along the 
upward way until he can lead them into the church 
which they may build with their own hands. So the 
education of heathen women must begin with their 
own problems and possibilities; to educate them out 
of their environment would be to waste time and lose 
opportunity as well as to make miserable the victims 
of mistaken method. It is no use to cry out against 

167 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

the position in which she is placed and butt the head 
of idealism against the stone wall of immemorial 
custom. It is better to overthrow it by the disin- 
tegrating force of new ideals in the native mind. The 
prejudice against woman becoming a public personage 
was respected by Paul when he counseled the women 
of Corinth to wear their veils. The women of Turkey 
took the same counsel to themselves, in the larger 
interests of reform, and resumed the veils they threw 
off when freedom first came. They will all the more 
surely be able to put them off in the end. The native 
ideals of woman's place in the home furnish the best 
channels for operation, and to make her a better home- 
keeper and a companion of her husband, to compel 
his respect for her and give her ability to rear her 
children with competence, is to put dynamite under 
the granite walls of pagan custom. An educated 
womanhood means the end of concubinage and po- 
lygamy and the gradual attainment of her right to 
refuse her hand in wedlock. Paganism makes her 
either a drudge or a toy. The first schools for the 
daughters of nobility and for the higher castes found 
parents unwilling that the girls should be taught do- 
mestic arts; they were to be the toys of rich men. 
The school brought a new idea of her place as a re- 
sponsible factor in home life, and raised her from the 
position of a beautifully feathered bird in the cage 
to that of a mature and responsible wife and mother. 
These women are now founding schools for their own 
sex, such as Miss Tsuda's in Tokio, and Ramabai's 
in Poona, and are editing journals advocating the 
freedom of their kind. . In Peking, a Mrs. Chang 

168 



EDUCATION 

edits a woman's daily, devoted to all the reforms that 
the most progressive Chinese women desire. There 
must be highly educated leaders who can lead the 
minds of their sisters and do the work of teachers 
and physicians, but the masses of women must make 
homes, and the missionary seeks to make of them such 
home-keepers that the homes will be the transforming 
places of a new generation. There are not enough 
of the former as yet, and it is good missionary policy 
to train a host of native women to lead their kind into 
the higher life, for the most benign foreign Christian 
can not so search the heart of a people as can one of 
their own race. 

5. Education as an Evangelizing Agency. 

"When the infant goes to school, his father will 
soon follow him to church," said a French missionary. 
The kindergarten and primary school have been the 
fruitful source of many conversions to Christianity. 
They have trained up a generation of children with 
respect for the faith and with minds well filled with 
the ideals of Christ, and they have opened the under- 
standing and won the hearts of many parents. Among 
the Karens 60% of the present-day members of the 
church were won through the schools. Eugene Stock, 
head of the great Church Missionary Society, and one 
of the greatest authorities on missions, says that in 
India the schools conducted by the missionaries have 
brought a greater number into the church than all 
other agencies combined. In Japan high school in- 
struction has proved the most fertile evangelistic 
field. The age of adolescence is the fruitful period 

169 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

for reaping religious convictions. Missions would 
do well to make all possible of this stage of instruction. 
The churches at home are learning from modern 
psychology that adolescence, or the high-school age 
of youth, is the time of life when ideals reign most 
supremely in the mind, and when young men and 
women put their instruction into action most readily. 
They are casting off from the moorings of paternal 
authority and turning out into the seas of self-reliance 
and independent action; it is the revolutionary period 
of life, the turning time. A thousand high and middle 
schools in China to-day would reap a mature fruitage 
of educated and self-reliant men for the service of the 
cause to-morrow. The Doshisha students are under 
such educational management as are the students 
of Yale and Columbia, i. e., the school is Christian 
but not denominational, and is conducted for the pur- 
poses of a broad education and not for that of con- 
version, yet the influence is such that one-third of all 
are baptized before they finish their course. This 
is really a remarkable record when we consider that 
the students come so largely from Buddhist homes, 
and from parents who, howsoever much they may be 
adapting their lives to the Christian way of thinking, 
do not consider that it is at all necessary or possible 
for them to unite with the infant church. In some 
of the mission schools of Japan as high as 65% of the 
pupils and 95% of the graduates become Christians. 
In all fields there have been more conversions among the 
educated classes during the past decade than ever 
before. Through the schools, the Christian theory 
of things, and the whole body of Christian history 

170 



EDUCATION 

and philosophy is getting into the minds of the people, 
and all are drawn nearer the Christian conception 
of life. Christianity is no longer a strange and de- 
spised religion because of its being a faith not compre- 
hended. In Livingstonia one-half the church members 
are the direct product of the schools. The evangelist 
may sow the best of seed in unprepared soil, and it may 
be unable to root deeply into life for the very lack of 
a prepared heart. Evangelism, as conducted on the 
mission field, is a matter of instruction; the preacher 
teaches, and before he baptizes his inquirer he ex- 
amines him closely. But many can not hear because 
their ears are deafened with the discordant voices of 
old superstitions, and their hearts are hardened with 
vice. 

Education is almost the only way of reaching the 
high castes and the Moslems. Duff founded his col- 
lege because of this fact. He found the proud Brah- 
man inaccessible to preaching but a possible student 
under the tender of mature instruction, for he is an 
educated man and honors learning. The same thing 
is true of the literati of China. The Samurai of Japan 
have been the most fruitful class for the effective 
evangel of education. Their devotion to learning 
led them to the mission school, and as they turned 
their backs upon the past they opened their minds 
to the mature lesson of Christianity. The Moslem 
man is supposed to read the Koran; it is a religious 
duty. He may be uneducated but be able to pick 
out the Arabic of his sacred book. In Nigeria it was 
found that natives who knew not a word of Arabic 
were so drilled that they could pronounce the words 

171 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

of the Koran, though they knew not what one of them 
meant. But education destroys the Koran. Literary 
criticism pulls down its every citadel of authority 
as it does that of the sacred books of India, stripping 
them of the husks of myth, legend, and puerility, 
to say nothing of the unspeakable impurities there is 
in them — so impure that the English government in 
India forbade the printing of English translations 
of some of them. The contradictions, fatalism, su- 
perstitions, and gross materialism of the Koran are 
revealed to the educated Moslem, and, while he may 
keep a form of fealty to it, he will not be longer a fanat- 
ical and intolerant worshiper of its very covers. His 
mind is broadened, his old intolerance broken down, 
his prejudices replaced by ideas, he imbibes the spirit 
of Christian charity and becomes a new type of folk 
in the midst of Moslem society. To wear down the 
fanaticism of Islam, to give the Mohammedan world 
a fairer view of the Christian world after thirteen 
centuries of conflict, to put the spirit of the old Cru- 
saders behind the gospel of the love of Christ, is the 
best that can be hoped for in the present, perhaps, 
but it is none the less a true evangelism, for it is pre- 
paring for a time when conversions will come by the 
thousands. There are to-day some 5,000 Moslem 
students in mission schools. Not many of them will 
actually join the church, the prejudice is yet so great, 
and the fanaticisn that lingers is sufficient to forbid 
instruction in Christian history and doctrine, though 
it is given in some schools, but all of them will be nearer 
the goal and they will make a new generation of open 
minds. 

172 




L&9& 



wfy&^hF -w t- ■ - 





mmr^ 



n^he First Class of Christian Inquirers in Tibet. Dr. Shelton 
■*- and Mr. Ogden baptized the first Christians in that land 
from this number. 




A dvanced Class in TJrumia College, Persia. Moslems, Jews, 
■^ and Christians are here drawn together, and ancient hates 
are lost under missionary instruction. 



EDUCATION 

Education is an evangelism of preparation where 
it does not directly bring the pupil into the church. 
It cultivates soil for the sowing even where the seed 
of direct Christian fealty does not take root. A noted 
English evangelist conducted a successful campaign 
among the missions of Ceylon, but found that nearly 
every one of his converts had been in the mission schools. 
The new can not always effectively enter until much of 
the old has been purged out. The second generation 
does not have to surmount the old walls of heathenism. 
Real Pentecosts are realized after the school has broken 
down the old barriers and changed the whole mental 
make-up. We have a Christian literature, breathe 
a Christian atmosphere, inherit Christian customs, 
live in the presence of churches, grow up in Christian 
or semi-Christian homes, and the golden thread of 
Christian philosophy runs through all we learn and 
think. It is not so in the non-Christian world. The 
mind of the cultured pagan is filled with the ideals 
and practices of his faith, and the social custom that 
has been fixed upon him by immemorial habit is never 
questioned. The savage heathen mind is undeveloped ; 
he is the creature of dread superstition; nature is full 
of demons, and religion is a thing of fear. He has no 
scientific processes of thinking and is a sublime egoist. 
His social life is narrowed to the necessities of his 
selfish career and no man trusts another for good. 
The children of the mission schools are given a new 
mind, a new conception of the universe and of the 
past, and the seeds of a better life philosophy are 
planted in their thinking. The result is an accessibil- 
ity to Christian truth on the part of many who do 

173 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSION 

not possess the spiritual enterprise necessary to ac- 
quire the faith that comes with a proclamation of 
the Word. A minority do possess that spiritual 
enterprise and have hearts so open that the evangel 
grips them and changes their lives, their instruction 
following their conversion; but the majority need the 
soil of their souls tilled and prepared for comprehension 
of the truth. The school has thus been one of the 
most fertile of evangelistic agencies. Bishop Tucker, 
of Uganda, tells of their evangelistic garnering during 
the five years from 1902 to 1907; they baptized 36,000, 
or more than 7,000 annually, and so many enrolled 
as inquirers that it was with difficulty they could 
give them instruction. In South India to-day, after 
mature schooling and a generation of successful work, 
there are so many pressing for entrance into the church 
that the missionaries are actually not able to give 
the necessary preliminary examinations as fast as 
they are requested; single fields have had as high as 
3,000 accessions in a year. John Mott conducted 
an evangelistic campaign among the students of 
Tokio that brought several hundred into the church, 
and has recently addressed student meetings in Egypt 
and among Mohammedans that taxed the capacity 
of the largest theaters and turned many away. It is 
safe to say that the faith of the Bishop of Madras, 
that 50,000,000 low caste men of India are ripe for 
the gospel, would be wrought into results if there 
were enough mission schools to reach them all. The 
rising tide of universal intelligence in India is unloos- 
ing them from the bonds that enthralled their minds 
and led them to accept their portion as one of the dis- 

174 



EDUCATION 

pensations of fate. If they could be led to see that, 
under Christianity, there is no caste, but an open way 
to make themselves the real saving salt of India, they 
would bring a democracy to the nation that would 
overturn all her traditions and give her a basis for 
real independence. Every chapel in Korea is also a 
schoolhouse, and the evangelistic wave that is sweeping 
that nation is not of the perfervid variety, but based 
upon a real discipleship, a mind that is instructed 
in the elements of Christian truth. Dr. Laws, of 
Livingstonia, says their vital evangelism is in their 
schools where 16,000 pupils are daily taught Christian 
living. To leaven the social life of a people is to con- 
duct a very real evangelism, and the reaction upon 
the life of the church is sure and permanent. "A 
sound Christian is always a well instructed Christian," 
says Dr. Hetherwick, of the Blantyre Mission. 



175 



CHAPTER V 

The Missionary and the Affairs of the 
World 

1. The Missionary and Other Powers of Prog- 
ress. 
"History shows no example of mere civilization 
elevating a sunken people," says Dr. Warneck. The 
heroic James Chalmers said he traveled all the South 
Seas, saw every kind of people, shared bed and board 
alike of savage and civilized, and that he never saw 
one place where mere commerce or political inter- 
ference had by themselves taken positive and per- 
manent good to the child-peoples. The story of the 
mingling of East and West is a tale of vice and crime, 
where it has not been relieved by the influences of 
those men who have not gone for the purposes of selfish 
gain. Gladstone said, " European intercourse with 
the uncivilized has, without exception, been disastrous 
unless attended by missionary exertions." The port 
cities of the Orient are famous for their wickedness; 
when two races meet they offer each other the worst 
they possess. The missionary is the one man who 
goes without selfish intent, and whose determination 
is to take social redemption and every other reform 
that will redound to the good of the people of the land. 
The trader goes for gain, and the soldier with a mission 
." 176 



MISSIONARY AND AFFAIRS OF THE WORLD 

that compels him to look upon the native as an inferior, 
fit only for subjection. The missionary seeks to 
understand the native man and to enter into a sym- 
pathetic relationship. He denies himself all the multi- 
tudinous opportunities that a new area may offer 
in way of personal gain, through the use of his expert 
knowledge of native needs, and devotes himself to an 
unselfish service. The trader may sell rum, or buy 
labor, or take advantage of ignorance to charge ten 
or fifty prices for materials that are really of little 
worth, but the missionary warns against such ne- 
farious traffic and teaches the victim of it how to supply 
his own needs. Chulalangkorn, the late progressive 
king of Siam, said, "The American missionaries have 
done more to advance the welfare of my country than 
any other foreign influence." "The missionaries 
are doing more for the civilizing and educating of the 
masses of the East than any other agency whatso- 
ever," said a British M. P. 

The missionary can not be a political emissary. 
He does not interfere in matters of government, but 
he can intercede. His intercession has been denomi- 
nated interference by those who found their selfish de- 
signs frustrated, and it is to such as them most of the 
charges against missionaries can be traced. In savage 
lands he is regularly called upon to intercede for 
the poor victims of savage injustice. He rescues 
slaves, saves women from cruelty, children from de- 
sertion, arbitrates in personal disputes, and advises 
those who plead for a better order of things. He goes 
to soften asperities, mould hearts to a love of com- 
munity peace, found ideas of democracy, and give 

12 177 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

new well springs of action. Through these things 
he exerts a vast, indirect influence upon government 
and society. He rarely joins the revolutionaries, 
but the lessons he teaches compel progress, and there 
are times when the masses must suffer death or fight 
for their right to live in peace with their new ideals; 
such times are rare, and the arts of peacefulness the 
missionary uses usually prevent any outbreaks of 
violence over his revolutionary principles. In Korea 
all missionary influence was against armed resistance 
to Japanese occupation; it would have been suicidal, 
and the experienced missioners thought the better 
way was to submit to the inevitable and move for the 
best possible terms in equity and native right to a 
part in public affairs. This was not done on behalf 
of imperialism, but on behalf of peace, the saving of 
life, and a more secure freedom in the future. 

In implanting ideas of democracy and personal 
right the missionary roots into the hearts of men in- 
fluences that make it impossible for them to submit 
supinely to oppression and injustice. The leaven 
of ideas ferments the lump, and men come into their 
own. The Christian community becomes a sort of 
Puritan nucleus in the old society; it stands for justice 
and righteousness, and human nature responds to the 
call for more benign rulership, once the possibility 
of its realization is shown. In a savage tribe any 
progressive is liable to be fixed upon by the witch 
doctor as a danger to his dread power, and made to 
suffer for any innovations; if in a more cultivated, 
though static civilization, he is feared as an innovator 
who threatens revered customs, and does violence to 

178 



MISSIONARY AND AFFAIRS OF THE WORLD 

the memory of the fathers and sages, and is quickly 
suppressed or violently put out of the way. The late 
Empress Dowager, before she accepted the inevitable 
through the failure of the Boxer rebellion, had sundry 
editors executed by slicing them up a few inches at a 
time, because they dared turn reformer, and the young 
emperor is known to have been a royal prisoner until 
the day of his death. 

The cultivating of ideals of democracy and per- 
sonal right lift a people into self-assertive integrity, 
and they evolve for themselves a better order of po- 
litical and social life. Efforts to force upon them 
things that may be for their benefit, but for which 
they are not prepared, and which they do not under- 
stand, are liable to be disastrous. This is the danger 
of colonial rule. Superstitions, traditions, and ancient 
customs are deeply grounded into their nature, and 
it is more than the task of a day to uproot them with- 
out destroying the community life. Poor bonds as 
they may be, they are nevertheless the bonds that give 
a social control, and with all their evils society will 
disintegrate if they are crushed without substituting 
better. 

It has been charged that the missionary, by taking 
white contact, takes ultimate death to the primitive 
peoples, that clothing and industry are their enemies, 
and that changed habits unfit them for their environ- 
ment. Where the missionary has been left to create 
his new order without the interference of other whites, 
there has been a steady increase in population. Such 
isolated islands in the South Seas show from one to 
three per cent increase in numbers annually. The 

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SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

charge that the Hawaiians are dying out is refuted 
by missionaries who have lately made a thorough in- 
vestigation of the subject; they are not only increasing 
in numbers, but in wealth, and in their interest in 
Christianity. Where governmental interference has 
modified the efforts of the missionary to create a self- 
supporting people of initiative and industry, by making 
them recipients of lands they did not need, and of 
pensions they did not earn, encouraging them thus 
to live in idleness, they have not kept pace with civil- 
ization; most of the American Indians and many of 
the Maoris of New Zealand are examples of this, 
though there are many individuals who have arisen 
to places of influence; Maoris sit in the legislature of 
New Zealand, and there are instances of American 
Indians arising to prominence in scholarship and states- 
manship. Even where the white race has brought its 
wholesale influence for good and bad, and contributed 
so largely of the latter, because the ignorance and child- 
like character of primitive peoples afford little resistance 
to the barterers of vice, there are virile qualities of 
racial character that withstand the contact. There 
are races in South Africa that have increased popula- 
tion from double to quadruple former numbers in a 
single generation. It is another pledge of missionary 
efficiency to learn that these peoples are those which 
he reached before the trader's caravan came, and that 
his ideals of temperance and personal integrity had 
taken hold. Civilization goes by war, politics, trade, 
or missions. Missions do not claim to be the only 
civilizing influence, but they do claim to be the most 
fundamental and unselfish. The missionary is the 

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MISSIONARY AND AFFAIRS OF THE WORLD 

only white man who goes for the first time to a bar- 
barous or other alien race for the express purpose 
of being their friends, and he is the only one of the 
above envoys that carries with him a confidence that 
every race can be elevated to a plane of self-sufficiency, 
and that the benign influence of personal service is 
the greatest force for the task. All the others, his- 
torically, have made subject peoples, and exploited 
them for gain; the missionary alone vicariously bears 
their burdens and has faith that they will become suf- 
ficient unto themselves by instruction and experience. 
He does not deny the power of politics and trade, he 
welcomes them, but he would not deliver any people 
over to any influence that would make mart of them, 
or fail to bring good tidings of peace. His implanting 
of the fundamental principles of manhood and social 
good carry his influence into all those more remote, 
though inevitable movements of government, law, 
commerce, and material advancement that follow an 
awakened consciousness and are used in the making 
of an era of progress. 

2. The Political Influence of the Missionary. 
The missionary creates a new type of citizenship. 
Like Paul of old, he is loyal to the powers that be and 
renders Caesar his dues, but his great purpose is that 
God shall have his portion. His work is the creation 
of a sense of personal freedom and of social responsi- 
bility, and the putting of a good conscience into all 
men. Non-Christian governments are generally arbi- 
trary ; there is little sense of citizenship ; rule is from 
above, and governments do not derive just powers 

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SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

from the consent of the governed. All arbitrary 
rulership partakes of the tyrannical, and, though 
democracy has its corruptions, oligarchies are no- 
toriously for the benefit of the few. Buckle says no 
man ever received great arbitrary powers without 
abusing them. In China all centers in the emperor, 
who is "The Son of Heaven," and theoretically, the 
father of his people; each province has a viceroy, who 
is, if a strong character, all but supreme in his state; 
under him are a series of officials, each with absolute 
powers in his realm, and accountable only to the man 
next above him ; there are nine grades of these officials, 
reaching from the emperor down to the local magis- 
trate. The local magistrate is a petty despot over 
the populace; to them he is virtually king, and his 
authority is supreme, save as exceptional appeal may 
be made over his head. The Chinese were taught 
a certain peculiar sense of democracy by Confucius, 
and appeal and rebellion are the final resorts. This 
absolute officiary is notoriously corrupt. As one of 
them told a traveler, "We are all worthy of execution, 
but if the emperor took off our heads, the next set 
would be as bad." The fault is in the sense of citizen- 
ship. In the mission churches the membership learns 
the rudiments of self-government and acquires a de- 
mocracy of spirit that makes them prize it. The 
Viceroy, Tuan Fang, declared that "the awakening 
of China may be traced in no small measure to the 
hand of the missionary." He planted the seeds of 
the new order, and in his education of youth gave a 
sense of freedom of personality, and of responsibil- 
ity for the universal welfare, that creates a genuine 

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MISSIONARY AND AFFAIRS OF THE WORLD 

patriotism. Arthur Smith says the Chinese had no 
real sense of patriotism in former days ; all officials were 
looked upon as public parasites and a necessary evil; 
the spirit of the people was that every man must look 
out for himself at any odds, and as a result government 
was not a public concern so much as a necessity that 
had to be endured, and in which each would do well 
to make the best of it for personal benefit. To-day 
the new patriotism has taken hold of the educated 
young men with the power of a religious zeal. It was 
given inception and has been cultivated in all mission 
schools, and every influence that the missionary could 
bring to bear has been in its favor. It is not confined 
to port cities and places where China has come into 
contact with material civilization; the west of China 
is furnishing many of the most progressive men, and 
is believed by residents in that section to be responding 
even more rapidly than any other to the call of the 
new era. "The missionaries," says Tuan Fang, 
"have borne the light of civilization into every nook and 
corner of the empire." Dr. Yen, Secretary of the Chi- 
nese Legation at Washington, gives "a large part of the 
credit for instituting this wonderful educational move- 
ment to missionary enterprise and foresight." Of 
missionary influence in Japan, Prince Ito said, "Japan's ^s^ 
progress and development are largely due to the in- 
fluence of missionaries, exerted in the right direction 
when Japan was first studying the outer world." 
The work of Guido Verbeck has already been noted. 
The fact that the emperor conferred signal honors 
upon him and that the government buried him with 
all the tokens of national respect, testify eloquently 

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SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

to his part in its remaking. He has been called "The 
Father of the Japanese Constitution." 

The missionary exerts a direct influence upon rulers 
in many cases. The makers of the new Japan made 
Verbeck's home their refuge for councils. Dr. Under- 
wood's parlor, in Korea, was the scene of many con- 
ferences of the foremost men of the kingdom in the 
days of transition. Both these men, and many others, 
thus became privy councilors of the reform party, 
and to their credit always used their positions to exert 
an influence that would make for peaceful revolution; 
they were teachers, not political leaders. When Ver- 
beck was allowed to do nothing more than teach Eng- 
lish, he used the New Testament and the Constitution 
of the United States for his text-books; the lessons 
were not lost. The Christian literature societies 
have sowed the seed of all progressive ideas of en- 
lightenment through their translation and distribution 
of books, and counted that by such indirect methods 
they were doing real missionary work through doing 
good to humanity, bringing the revolutionary forces 
of new ideas into the minds of the leaders of a nation. 
The late Emperor of China was made a reformer 
through books supplied by the Society for the Diffusion 
of Christian Knowledge, and his chief adviser, the great 
reformer and exile, Kang Yu-Wei, said, "I owe my 
conversion to reform and my knowledge of reform to 
the writings of two great missionaries, Dr. Timothy 
Richard and Dr. Allen." 

In barbarous lands the influence of the missionary 
is as much more direct as the need is greater and the 
enlightenment of the ruler less. "Savages are made 

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MISSIONARY AND AFFAIRS OF THE WORLD 

into law-abiding citizens by missionaries better than 
by any other process," said the Governor of New 
Guinea. A British Commodore in the waters of that 
same savage island said, " These gentlemen have es- 
tablished such a hold over the natives as many a 
crowned head would be glad to possess." Once the 
missioner gains their confidence, he becomes an all- 
powerful influence in their tribal life. He is called 
upon to settle disputes between tribes, and wards off 
many a bloody battle. The history of heroic, personal 
interventions on behalf of peace would fill an inspiring 
volume. Savage justice scarcely deserves the name; 
it is fraught with arbitrary judgment, if not with trial 
by some process of superstition instead of upon the 
merits of the case, and the accused is regarded as guilty 
until some fate established his innocence. The mis- 
sionary intercedes for justice and teaches the arts 
of its administration to the chieftains. In the South 
Seas they wrote whole codes, notably in Tahiti and 
Raiatea, and saw them adopted by the voice of chief- 
tains, and approved of the people. Ex-Secretary 
John Foster said that the political reorganization of 
those islands was almost entirely the work of mis- 
sionaries. Whole communities were persuaded to 
move from low to high lands for the sake of health, 
were reorganized in government, given a better type 
of architecture and agriculture, and persuaded to write 
permanent pacts of peace with ancient enemies. 
In Africa the missionary has to his credit several re- 
formed governments among savage tribes, any one of 
which would be well worth the whole missionary ex- 
ertion in that continent. Khama the Good is one 

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SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

of the notable names of native African history. His 
government of the Bechuannas has been a model in 
primitive control. He abolished slavery, polygamy, 
and concubinage, established industry, absolutely 
prohibited intoxicants, and set up courts that sub- 
stituted justice by fair trial in place of the old bar- 
barities of trial by ordeal and the whims of the witch 
doctor. There has been no war under his adminis- 
tration, whereas before war was the chief business of 
the people; the traveler has been made safe anywhere 
in his realm, and trade is carried on with even more 
sense of right on behalf of the black man than on 
behalf of the white man, who all too often comes pre- 
possessed with the idea that he is a superior being, 
and that it is "no harm to cheat a nigger." The story 
of Coillard's influence over Lewanika is but little 
less thrilling than that of Moffat's over Africaner; 
from a bloody and drunken despot he was converted 
into a sober, just ruler, and though not professing 
Christianity openly, as Khama and Daudi have done, 
he lives well up to its ethical code and has transformed 
his country. The transformation of Uganda has been 
spoken of heretofore. The influence of the mission- 
aries has reached on out to the west of Uganda and 
made quite as notable conquests. Daudi, king of 
Toro, is one of the most remarkable of African chief- 
tains. He has led his people into new ways of peace, 
and preaches Christianity both to them and to neigh- 
boring tribes. He has gone to those with whom he 
was perpetually at war, and, in the name of the new 
peace, exhorted them to accept his way of life and 
government. Many such narratives could be given 

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MISSIONARY AND AFFAIRS OF THE WORLD 

of South Sea chieftains. Thokambau, of Figi, was one 
of the most notable in missionary annals. He was a 
man of exceptional forcefulness and had used his power 
up to the limits of savage brutality. The list of his 
victories and of the horrible feasts he had provided 
from bands of prisoners taken was long. He lived 
for a quarter of a century as a Christian ruler, and saw 
the new order established over a citizenship that could 
read and write, and that worshiped the God of peace 
in peace. Often he looked upon the orphaned and the 
widowed whose sad fate was of his making in the days 
of his savagery, and wept in pleas for forgiveness. It 
is the glory of the missioner that he was able, in most 
cases, to bring about the change without bloodshed, 
though there have been times when the party of re- 
action and savagery, because they were the beneficiaries 
of the inequalities and cruelties of the old system, have 
made war upon the party of peace and progress. In 
such times the cause of right had to be defended, but 
victory was ever celebrated with forgiveness and an 
effort to win the vanquished to the better way. 

Loyalty and a better type of citizenship is ever the 
missionary's aim. When the powers were threatening 
to partition China, the missionaries were fast friends 
of the empire and gave all influence to its maintenance. 
During the war with Russia the missionary body passed 
strong resolutions of loyalty to Japan. They were 
among the first to advocate repeal of "extra territori- 
ality." In India they have ever plead the cause of 
the people, if not according to the ideals of the more 
radical political elements, at least on behalf of justice 
to the native and a humane administration of law. 

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SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

British administrators give them credit for suggesting 
many emendations of law that were for the popular 
good, made possible through their thorough and sym- 
pathetic understanding of the common life. In 
Korea they exerted all influence in favor of a purer 
government, and native Christians refused to submit 
to the demands of corrupt officials, though they scrupu- 
lously obeyed the law and paid the legal tax. Their 
action was strong in calling attention to official cor- 
ruption, and when the revolution began it was held 
on its course through the influence of a club that was 
predominantly Christian, loyal to the king, and per- 
sistent in its demands for reform at his hands. 

The missionary is not a political emissary, but the 
welfare of a people is so intimately bound up with its 
political destiny, that in influencing them for a better 
manhood and more humane ways of life he must 
indirectly, at least, influence their political destiny. 
That influence is positive for a larger participation of 
the common people in government, and, through the 
popular education given in mission schools, there is 
raised up a generation of men who are able both to 
obtain it and maintain it. The missionary does not 
go to create republics, but he does go to create a citizen- 
ship, and whether the form of government be repub- 
lican or monarchical, it must be more democratic as 
the masses rise in intelligence and personal responsibil- 
ity, and the change will always be ushered in by the 
arts of peaceful revolution if the influence of the mis- 
sioner is dominant in the councils of reform. 



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MISSIONARY AND AFFAIRS OF THE WORLD 



3. Making Two Blades of Grass Grow Where 
One Grew Before. 

Booker T. Washington said that if he had to choose 
between sending his graduates to Africa to preach 
salvation in another world, or to teach the natives how 
to make two blades of grass grow where one grew be- 
fore, he would choose the latter. He believes that it 
does little good to preach an otherworldliness and 
leave men in the old sordid environment of this present 
world. Fortunately there is no such alternative. We 
no longer hear the plea that we must hasten to the 
heathen because so many millions are plunging an- 
nually into an eternal abyss of fire. Not more than 
twenty years ago some of our greatest boards made 
belief in that sort of doctrine an essential in a mission- 
ary candidate. To-day we go, as Dr. Clark puts it 
in his little volume on "A Study of Christian Missions," 
to " plant" rather than to "rescue." Jesus did not 
come merely to save a few out of the world, but to save 
the world. So the missionary goes to save individuals 
and through them to save a world, and he has faith 
that the little band of "Jesus men," as they are gener- 
ally called, will be the saving salt of society. Every- 
where he makes two blades of grass grow where one 
grew before, and, increasing the capacity of men to 
appreciate and use the material factors of civilization, 
he builds up a self-supporting society of more advanced 
grade, and creates an environment that makes it pos- 
sible for them to enjoy the benefits of progress. 

The missionary creates new wants. Without the 
desire for things not yet possessed, the more primitive 

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SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

and backward civilizations could not be lifted beyond 
their present attainments. The primitive man is not 
a creature of many wants ; he is satisfied with provision 
for immediate needs, therefore he is not industrious. 
The chase and warfare seem to him more direct means 
of satisfying his desires, so he resorts to those sporadic 
and cruel arts and despises the cultivation of nature 
as the work of those who can not fight and hunt. 
This indignity done, the art of labor condemns woman- 
kind to the status of a slave, military necessity creates 
despotism, and the tribe is condemned to penury or 
starvation, if it be not successful in its barbarous 
enterprises. The missionary changes the ideals of 
economy and substitutes honest toil for rapine, teaching 
the native that it is easier, and much more sure, for 
him to cultivate nature and become the recipient of 
her lavish gifts than it is to prey upon man and wild 
beast, and put his livelihood under a gamble of luck, 
or at the stake of battle. 

Among primitive peoples especially this lays upon 
the missionary the necessity of training whole popula- 
tions in the arts of industry. The work of industrial 
schools has been treated in a former chapter. The 
industrial work of the missionary is not confined to 
that of the industrial school; it is limited only to the 
industrial needs of the Christian community he founds. 
The poverty-stricken methods of industrial economy 
must all be revised and the implements of more pro- 
gressive ways introduced. We have already seen how 
thousands of plows were introduced into the fields of 
East Africa by the Livingstonia, Blantyre, and Zam- 
besi missions. The same thing was done in India, and 

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MISSIONARY AND AFFAIRS OF THE WORLD 

small American plows replaced the ancient pointed 
stick by tens of thousands. The missionary adapted 
looms and cotton gins to native necessities in India, 
and introduced them into Africa together with the 
cultivation of cotton. The Scotch mission on Lake 
Nyassa started coffee growing, and wheat was intro- 
duced into Uganda, New Zealand, and in many other 
fields. In India a superior method of milling the grain 
was taught and the machinery necessary brought 
from abroad by missionary hands. In China many 
missionaries have become especially interested in 
problems of agriculture, and have given to the hard- 
working and economical Chinese farmer methods of 
intensive cultivation that have made work much more 
productive and life by that much less hard. In semi- 
arid lands he has taught the arts of irrigation, and in 
China improved the wells and canals that had been 
used from time immemorial for the watering of the 
fields. In Assam tea culture was begun, and orange 
growing was taken to the South Seas. A partial list 
of the edibles introduced in various lands will give 
some idea of the scope of his industrial activities in 
the task of giving peoples a better chance in life. He 
has transplanted oranges, limes, mangoes, cocoanut 
palms, cocoa beans, pine-apples, coffee, cotton, toma- 
toes, wheat, barley, corn, and almost every other 
edible adaptable to the land in which he happened 
to find the necessity; he has transported cattle, builded 
boats, laid out roadways, constructed houses, moulded 
brick, dug canals, cultivated fields, established mer- 
cantile houses, and contributed every art of material 
progress as an aid to his beneficent work of creating 

191 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

a civilization. The Zulu mud hut became a neat, 
square cottage, with tile roof; the Syrian hovel became 
a two-storied house with chimneys where before the 
smoke had escaped through a hole in the thatch, and 
with tiled floor, where before there was only a hole in 
the mud wall ; the South Sea common shed, where from 
forty to sixty persons of all ages and both sexes lived in 
common, was changed into separate family houses; 
Hindu villages have been so changed that travelers can 
always tell they have felt the impress of Christianity. 
Peoples who roved from place to place, following the luck 
of the chase, have been induced to settle into stable 
communities and till the ground for a living, substitu- 
ting substantial dwelling-places for the bed of sand 
and the shelter of bower or cave; the sheet iron stove 
has been substituted for the charcoal brazier or the 
brick oven in which weeds and grass were burned 
and warmth given the limbs of little children that had 
suffered severely with the only slightly tempered 
cold of closed and stifled rooms. 

The missionary has developed native products 
and created new types of native implements and put 
peoples on their own resources. In the South Seas 
he discovered the uses of arrow-root and taught the 
native how to make it one of the staples of life. He 
dug wells and showed the wondering savages how to 
quench their thirst when there was no rain, and moved 
plantations back from the miasmatic lowlands of stream 
beds to the healthier uplands. He has induced com- 
munities to remove their villages from sandy and arid 
lands to richer soil by adapting novel products to 
their native arts of cultivation. It is claimed he in- 

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MISSIONARY AND AFFAIRS OF THE WORLD 

vented the jinrikisha, and thus gave Japan its chief 
vehicle. The Khaki dye is one of his African dis- 
coveries, and many medical remedies can be traced 
to his study of botany. He produced a movable 
type for Japanese character and invented typewriters 
for the Burmese and Chinese, the latter with four 
thousand characters on its type wheel. John Williams 
taught the South Sea Islanders how to build ships, 
and they became quite adept, substituting vessels 
of several hundred tons burden for their old " dug- 
outs." In East Africa Mackay built some two or 
three hundred miles of roadway and thus began the 
innovation that has replaced miles of winding native 
paths with excellent roadbeds. The Lake Nyassa 
mission builded the famous Stevenson road joining 
Lakes Nyassa and Tanganika. Everywhere his effort 
has been so to create the arts of industry, the desire for 
a better manner of living, and so to develop native 
resourcefulness that every community would become 
self-sufficient, able to provide for its own higher wants, 
or so to contribute to those of other places that trade 
would bring all the means for a better manner of life, 
and thus allow the stable attainment of those higher 
intellectual and spiritual states which are conceived 
to be the goal of life. 

As the material adjuncts of better living depend 
upon the creation of new desires, so their use and main- 
tenance depend upon the building up of a sense of 
honesty, of community service, . the practice of the 
golden rule in business and industrial relationships, 
and the necessity of economy and self-dependence. 
The common people of India, like our negro masses 

13 193 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

in the South, live on credit. They are forever in 
debt, and the usurer is pitiless; the lowest rate of in- 
terest is one per cent per month, the average annual 
rate is from 20% to 30%, and often runs as high as 
70%. In China and Moslem lands the rate will 
run from one to three per cent per month, and in 
Siam it runs up to 100%. There is literally no limit 
upon the power or avariciousness of the native money 
lender, and he enforces his legal rights with Shylock 
severity. The debtor's prison is a crushing institution, 
and slavery is the nemesis of the hopeless debtor. 
The missionary cultivates a thrift that escapes the 
usurer, and, where necessary, founds savings insti- 
tutions, co-operates with the government in inducing 
the people to use Agricultural Banks, or adopts the 
English Provident Societies as means for defeating 
the all-consuming dragon of interest. Retail trade 
is a process of haggling over prices and rests upon 
the theory that one must get, not what an article is 
worth, but what another may be induced to pay for it. 
The missioner lends all influence to more open and 
scientific methods of commerce, and to the cultivation 
of that trust of one another that makes trade one of 
the constructive arts of a civilized life, instead of a 
barbarous method of taking advantage of necessity. 
In numerous instances the native Christian has built 
up a renumerative business by practicing the simple 
arts of open dealing, making every article just what 
he represented it to be, with the price plainly marked 
upon it. By elevating the moral standards he culti- 
vates a character that is able to appreciate the benefits 
of a more progressive material civilization, and by 

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MISSIONARY AND AFFAIRS OF THE WORLD 

introducing the arts of a more progressive material 
civilization he fortifies the moral and social life he 
has planted with an environment that sustains and 
upbuilds it. 

4. The Pioneer of Civilization. 

The missionary is the pioneer of civilization. He 
discovers new realms, explores unknown regions, 
opens trade routes, establishes friendly relations with 
barbarous and hermit peoples, and cultivates a uni- 
versal desire for the arts and goods of civilization. 
The Chinese Ambassador to the United States calls 
him "the frontiersman of trade and commerce." The 
emissaries of world trade have gone to the Orient 
prejudiced against him, and returned to proclaim him 
"the advance agent of business," and the greatest 
benefactor of the Orient. A certain commercial man 
went to China with all the prejudice a materialistic 
mind and an ignorance of missions could create; in 
Shanghai he drank a toast to commerce and proclaimed 
aversion to the missionary ; six months later he returned 
to the same club to praise the emissary of Christian- 
ity as the choicest product of modern civilization, 
the harbinger of all progress, and the greatest asset 
that commerce possessed in the Orient. He is not a 
"drummer," nor does he go with any avowed attempt 
to open trade routes, or act as an advance agent for 
Western commerce. But so surely as he elevates a 
people he creates within them the desire for things 
that civilized industry alone can produce, and by 
piercing new lands and exploring unseen regions he 
opens avenues for the trader. He has little interest 

195 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

in trade as such; in fact he often finds the frontier 
trader his chief enemy, for he deals in rum, firearms, 
opiates, and much useless material, and generally 
takes sinful advantage of the guilelessness of the 
primitive man. True exchange of commodities is 
one of the promoters of civilization, and between it 
and the missionary cause there is a large community 
of interest, but the brutal trade in men, known as the 
"Kanaka traffic" in the South Pacific Seas, the "red 
rubber" commerce of the Congo with its unspeakable 
oppression and brutality, the opium trade in China with 
its resultant "Opium War," the merchandise of cocoa 
and its accompanying slavery in Portuguese West 
Africa, and the universal decimation from rum wherever 
it has been taken, constitute a series of evils for which 
civilized powers can make no apology. The mission- 
ary has heroically protested against all these evils. 
John G. Paton labored arduously to obtain the in- 
ternational agreement protecting primitive peoples 
against the expert of rum and firearms from civilized 
lands. The missionary body in China have always 
protested vigorously against the enforced opium trade. 
Two missionaries, Drs. Morrison and Shepherd, at 
risk to their work and their lives, and by submitting 
to arrest and harassment, were influential in bringing 
about a change in the governmental supervision of the 
Congo regions that promises to abolish the oppressive 
system of taxation and the cruelties of "red rubber." 
The missionary protest against the "Kanaka traffic" 
in the South Seas brought stringent laws against it, 
and finally abolished the whole system of indenture 
upon which it hung. Wherever white men have traded 

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MISSIONARY AND AFFAIRS OF THE WORLD 

in the flesh of the blacks, the Protestant missionary 
has been at enmity with him. The work of Livingstone 
in abolishing the slave trade in Africa needs no re- 
hearsing here. He declared he went to open roads for 
commerce and missions, and to substitute trade in 
commodities for the universal African trade in men. 
The result was that African Companies were formed. 
British naval vessels patrolled the African coasts in 
quest of Arab slave dhows, and new forms of currency 
were introduced in place of the old standard of ex- 
change, which was expressed in the value of a slave. 
Civilization brings new wants, and new wants mean 
exports. Dr. Dennis says a careful estimate made by 
Englishmen, the greatest of all world traders, was 
that every pound spent on missions brought back 
ten pounds in commerce, and quotes another authority 
as saying that "when a missionary has been on the 
field twenty years he is worth $50,000 per year to Brit- 
ish commerce." A study of African communities 
showed that after they were Christianized they used 
ten times as much merchandise as before. To teach 
a million people to wear clothes means an immense 
trade in cotton, and to persuade them to keep their 
clothes and faces clean brings demands for soap. 
When missionaries first went to Syria there was not 
a window glass in the country. They introduced both 
window glass and stoves, and nearly every house in 
Asia Minor is now supplied. The trade in plows in 
Africa and India has already been noted. The sta- 
tistics Dr. Dennis gives of trade in the South Seas totals 
millions annually, and is directly traceable to mission- 
ary labors. That of the Lake regions of Africa is no 

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SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

less due to missionary pioneering and the transforma- 
tions wrought in the desires of a barbarous population. 
Wu Ting Fang wittily remarked that if we could in- 
duce Chinamen to lengthen their shirt-tails one inch 
it would make the cotton-growers of the South rich. 
The missionaries to China have opened museums, 
illustrating the material and other achievements of 
civilization, and as many as 100,000 have passed 
through their doors in one year's time. They have 
established "model stores" to introduce those imple- 
ments of progress that would be of profit to their 
communities and conducted them, without an eye 
to profit, until normal channels of trade could be 
opened. Many mission schools have business de- 
partments for the training of the youth in the ways 
of upright commerce, and every school gives instruc- 
tion in the things of universal interest, the life and 
work of the world, and the advantage of open com- 
munication with all mankind. 

The missionary has not laid down railroads, but 
his work has expedited their construction. The first 
successful train traffic in North China was conducted 
along a route where there had been a line of mission 
stations for twenty years; other roads were angrily 
torn up by the coolies and their friends, who saw a 
single locomotive doing the work of hundreds of men. 
The missions had so made for progress that the people 
were ready for the innovations it brought. To-day 
there are 6,000 miles of railroad in China and as much 
more projected; the Chinese will probably be the 
greatest railroad builders of the century. Africa 
will ere long be traversed both from east to west and 

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MISSIONARY AND AFFAIRS OF THE WORLD 

from north to south by direct lines of rail and steam- 
boat traffic. It was the missionary, Krapf, who 
first designed an eastern to western route by means 
of a transcontinental line of mission stations, and 
Bishop Gray dreamed long before Cecil Rhodes of a 
Cape to Cairo route by means of a continuous line 
of mission stations and traversible roadways connecting 
them. It was Mackay who first suggested the Uganda 
railroad. Wherever the missionary goes the trading- 
ship, the railroad, and the telegraph follow in course 
of time. He is not the sole creator of trade routes, 
and in some instances the trader has preceded him, 
but the rule has been that he pioneered the way, and 
it has ever been that he first found that way into the 
hearts of the people which Stanley called the greatest 
achievement. 

Where there has been no open means of trade, or 
no honest means at hand, the missionary has founded 
trading companies as adjuncts to his work of creating 
a civilization. He has never conducted the commerce 
himself for the advantages of profit ; if it was necessary 
to establish a commerce he did it as a means to his one 
task of converting men to Christianity and building 
a civilized community in which they could retain their 
new-found life, and he relinquished it upon the first 
opportunity that offered. The Uganda Company, 
the Scottish Missions Industries Company of the 
Blantyre Mission, the Livingstonia Trading Company 
of the Livingstonia Mission, the Papuan Industries 
of New Guinea, and the Basle Mission Trading Com- 
pany are instances of commercial auxiliaries formed 
by missionary men, independent of missionary so- 

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SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

cieties, and for the specific purposes of working in 
harmony with missionary activities. Their purpose 
is to give the natives a social environment in which 
they can develop Christian character, to enable them 
to become independent, to make the mission self- 
supporting, and to protect them against unscrupulous 
traders. These companies superintend plantations, 
develop the cultivation of sugar, cotton, coffee, and 
rubber, make bricks, build houses, transport goods, 
build lake vessels, construct roads, and give all possible 
financial and instructional encouragement to natives 
in the building up of independent farms and busi- 
nesses of their own. They are typical examples of 
philanthropy and five per cent, with great emphasis 
upon the philanthropic part of enterprise. They 
furnish models in business enterprise and examples 
in business integrity. Josiah Strong advocates a plan 
to send superior Christian young men to the mission 
fields as merchants, commercial men, investors, and 
superintendents of all manner of enterprises conducted 
there by the whites. He would make them an anti- 
dote to those worshipers of mammon and devotees 
of materialism that go with a spirit of adventure to 
the conduct of such enterprises, and also a positive 
force for the introduction of Christian ethics into 
those commercial relations that so often afford dif- 
ficulties to the non-Christian mind in its wrestle with 
the appeal of the missionary. 

The missionary is a maker of men and civilization. 
Among the necessities of his work are the arts of ma- 
terial progress. He needs them to supply the newly 
awakened wants, and to furnish an environment in 

200 



MISSIONARY AND AFFAIRS OF THE WORLD 

which the awakened lives of men can find safety. Sir 
Hiram Maxim, an advocate of materialism, wrote 
a virulent attack on the missionary ; he used unbecom- 
ing language even in the violence of his prejudices 
against both the man and his method. The Chinese 
Courts have interdicted its circulation in China, one 
of the judges on the Supreme Bench at Shanghai say- 
ing, "I never read such balderdash." There is no 
conflict between honest commerce and the missionary, 
nor between the arts of material progress and his 
work of awakening the souls of men. Commerce and 
politics owe him a vast debt for his work of explora- 
tion, of creating new wants, of opening closed and 
savage lands to civilization, and for his transforming 
and peace-making evangel. 

5. The Missionary and Universal Peace. 

The dominating world movement of our time is 
that toward universal peace. There has not been a 
great war between Western nations in the last genera- 
tion. To-day there are no less than sixty arbitration 
treaties in force, and such international agreements 
bid fair to grow rapidly, both in number and in the 
scope of their provisions. The nations are drawn 
together with numerous common agreements; the 
Navigator's Code is used by forty of them alike, and 
the International Postal and Telegraphic Union in- 
cludes fifty-five. International conferences include 
every conceivable question that is of common concern, 
from a general conference on morals up to the Inter- 
parliamentary Union and The Hague Tribunal. The 
Central American Peace Union is an actualized ex- 

201 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

ample of enforced conciliation through judicial pro- 
cedure. The Hague Prize Court bids fair to become 
the nucleus of a universal court of arbitration. The 
American Bureau of Republics, including twenty- 
one nations, is so educating the Americans on the 
commonality of their enterprises that war will be- 
come impossible as public opinion receives educa- 
tion. The Red Cross is an unofficial, but none the 
less real, international bond. International law is 
becoming a recognized code that will demand a 
court, and rules of war have the force of inter- 
national legislation. The neutralization of terri- 
tory is one of the most signal signs of a " Truce of 
God" in our times. The Baltic and North Seas are 
now neutralized in the interest of common safety, 
and various ones of the smaller nations are guaranteed 
against attack by the power of stronger governments; 
such is the case with Switzerland, Belgium, and Nor- 
way. 

The growth of common knowledge, the widening 
sympathy that a more universal education brings, 
the common interests of an international commerce 
that is making the whole world one vast trading mart, 
the rising intelligence of labor and its awakening to 
the fact that it bears all the burdens in the end, the 
tendency of all legislation to take on a social cast, and 
the evolving spirit of humanitarianism, all make 
mightily against warfare. The ideals of one age work 
out into action in the next. Kings and diplomats 
can no longer make war. "The people now, not 
governments, make friendships or discord, peace or 

202 



MISSIONARY AND AFFAIRS OF THE WORLD 

war, between nations," said Secretary Root. It is 
gratifying to have Secretary Yen, of the Chinese 
delegation, declare that " There is a public opinion 
in China now that makes itself heard," for it has been 
the fear of the West that the Yellow man would arise 
to avenge the wrongs done him. If it is left to public 
opinion there will be no "Yellow Peril," for the masses 
of China are peaceful by nature and through long 
habit. "They believe, philosophically, in the right 
so thoroughly," said Sir Robert Hart, "that they 
scorn to think it requires to be enforced or supported 
by might." j 

When we turn to the other side of the question and 
see the vast preparations constantly being made for 
war, we wonder if there is any real promise of its ces- 
sation. The world is staggering to-day under a vast 
war debt of $35,000,000,000, and goes on spending 
no less than $2,000,000,000 annually on preparations 
for battles they hope will never come. There is yet 
a "military party" dominant in most of the nations. 
Russia runs up an annual deficit of $75,000,000, but 
makes plans for a billion dollar navy. France, Ger- 
many, Italy, and even England, are in debt until the 
interest alone is a great burden upon public revenues, 
and the wages of the laborer are so low as to forbid 
him the promise of a competence in old age. Even 
the United States spends hundreds of millions yearly 
on her army and navy, though she possesses that "mag- 
nificent isolation" which ought to take her out of the 
suspicions of old-world complications. Her popula- 
tion has increased 85% in the last thirty years, her 

203 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

wealth 185%, and her expenditures 400%, two-thirds 
of it for a military budget. Might we not cry with 
Katrina Trask: 

" Peace is not peace that sings its battle songs, 
And sets its cannons on a hundred hills; 

Peace is the great affirmative of God; 
It knows no armies, arms or armaments; 
For armies, arms, and armaments deal death, 
And peace holds conquest in the strength of life; 
Its crown immortal is unconquerable. 

Cease to build battle-ships and death's grim en- 
ginery; 

Cease to pay tribute to the god of war; 

And cease — O Pharisees — to pray 'Thy Kingdom 
come,' 

While you are voting means to make a hell, 

In some vain boasted cause of righteousness." 

Commerce and politics have been the fruitful 
sources of most modern wars. The accusation that 
missions have been the cause of conflict is easily re- 
futed. In China the Boxer rebellion afforded oppor- 
tunity for much materialistic and misanthropic mis- 
judgment of missions. That rebellion involved mis- 
sions only because they were foreign, not because they 
were religious, or because of any direct opposition 
to the missionary as an emissary of Christianity, or 
an opponent of native faiths. Missions is the one 
world movement of our time that stands unalterably 

204 



MISSIONARY AND AFFAIRS OF THE WORLD 

opposed to warfare. One nation might listen to the 
demands of commerce and compel another to open 
its ports to trade; political consideration might compel 
the opening of a land like Tibet; but missions never 
asked for force to open Tibet or any other closed land, 
though they might wait, like the lonely Moravian 
at his outpost in the Himalayas, thirty years for the 
day to come when he could enter in with his message 
of human good, or like Peter Rijnhart, who was mar- 
tyred in attempting to win Tibet's friendship, give 
his own life in an effort to show a hermit folk that the 
missionary would bring them good if only they would 
let him come in. 

The missioner has brought peace to vast popula- 
tions that knew no other manner of contact than that 
of strife and bloodshed. In the South Seas whole 
tribes were won from the decimating terrors of inter- 
tribal strife to a peace that has not been broken in 
two generations. The Fijians number more than 
100,000 souls, and a more peaceful land is unknown; 
John Hunt found them living by war and cannibalism. 
The Battaks of Sumatra number 50,000, and are 
to-day a nation of cruel, superstitious, warlike folk, 
won to the gentle arts of peace. The Sarawaks were 
among the most dangerous and thieving of aboriginal 
peoples ; an English traveler says that to-day a traveler 
may drop his portmanteau anywhere on the pathway, 
ramble in perfect peace where a few years ago his head 
would have been taken, and return to find his goods 
untouched. The Zulus were perhaps the ablest and 
most competent militarists ever discovered among 
primitive peoples. They had a regular military, or- 

205 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

ganization with companies and corps, and a military 
law. Their fighting qualities are the equal of any 
living race, but they were won to arts of peace by the 
missionaries before the white trader made inroads 
upon them. In Uganda, Mackay found Mtesa ruling 
a well organized primitive state. His army, with its 
regularly constituted series of chieftains, was anything 
but a savage horde of undisciplined raiders, and was 
used to prey upon weaker neighboring tribes in a vast 
slave trade that counted its victims by the thousands. 
To-day Winston Churchill says he never traveled 
in a more law-abiding, peaceful land, and lays his 
tribute of praise upon the head of the missionary. 

Wherever the missionary has gone he has been a 
force for conciliation between the intruding white 
and the native peoples. He has stood between the 
arrogance of the colonial administrator or the pioneer 
trader and the rights of the native races, and his in- 
timate understanding of the native mind and custom 
has been a source of information to governors who 
desired to do the best by their primitive wards. Sir 
Mackworth Mackenzie, Lieutenant Governor of the 
Punjab, said the lives and teachings of the mission- 
aries are the most potent influence working there. 
Our first ministers to China found the missionaries 
indispensable to their work and testified that without 
them, with their use of the native tongue and their 
sympathetic knowledge of the native mind, their 
work would have been impossible. Without a single 
exception these ambassadors of the early days became 
warm defenders of missions, and especially of the mis- 
sionary, as a force making for peace between the 

206 



MISSIONARY AND AFFAIRS OF THE WORLD 

nations. It was S. Wells Williams who wrote the " Tol- 
eration Clause " in our treaty with China,which was later 
put into that of England also. He also brought about 
the "Most Favored Nation Clause" of our treaty with 
Japan. Dr. Dennis cites numerous specific instances 
of such direct influence of the missionary in inter- 
national relations. Missionaries have accepted con- 
sulates and sat on government commissions because 
of the opportunities offered to prevent friction and culti- 
vate comity. Dr. Allen became our first minister to 
Korea and was a dominant influence in the peaceable 
opening of that closed land to civilization and contact 
with the world. Verbeck sent a Japanese commission 
around the world and opened their eyes to its marvels, 
resulting in a quick opening of the land to all the in- 
fluences of civilization, and a proclamation of absolute 
toleration. The missionary has ever stood for the 
essential oneness of races and nations; admitting the 
vast difference in attainments, he believes in the po- 
tentialities of even the least among men, if only they 
be discriminatingly educated and trained through the 
long period it must take to raise up a civilization. 
"All conclusions based upon the assumption that the 
status of a race at any particular moment is to be 
wholly or largely explained by the physical character- 
istics of that race, turns out to be an illusion," says Lord 
Weardale, President of the Universal Races Congress. 
Kipling may sing that "East is East and West 
is West, and never the twain shall meet," but the mis- 
sionary, pre-eminently the world's cosmopolite, out 
of his rich experience and sympathetic understanding 
of peoples, his scientific study of the psychology of 

207 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

racial minds, his explorations into the sociology of all 
mankind, and his experiments in the creation of civil- 
ization, believes that there is a broad and deep foun- 
dation of universal human experience that warrants 
him in contending for a world order of peace and inter- 
racial communion that will adjust all difficulties, 
assure every people of their own independent oppor- 
tunity to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, 
and make all mankind one of kin. Peace is bound up 
in an attitude of mind more than in any external ar- 
rangements that can be made. The missionary culti- 
vates that attitude of mind in his instructions in fra- 
ternity, his breaking down of provincialism and sec- 
tionalism, his demand for equality of human right, his 
inculcation of a universal religion of humanity, and. 
his presentation of one Father God to all men. Prin- 
cipal Fairbairn said that to have realized Plato's Re- 
public would have ruined humanity. To realize 
Christ's Kingdom of God alone will save all humanity 
to peace and fellowship, and lift up that very class 
whom Plato deemed it impossible to elevate. Chan- 
cellor Kent said, "A general diffusion of the Bible is 
the most effectual way to civilize and humanize man- 
kind." Its circulation is an evangel of ideals; a knowl- 
edge of it founds in the minds of men those ideas that 
break down suspicion and substitute confidence, for- 
bids one preying upon another and demands service 
one of another, establishes a universal spirit of de- 
mocracy, and inspires humanity with brotherly love. 



208 



CHAPTER VI 

The Social Way of Unity 

1. The Field and the Kingdom. 

It is estimated that there are now 1,700,000,000 
souls in the world. Of this number only about 550,- 
000,000 are even nominally Christian. Thus two- 
thirds of humanity are yet to be evangelized. If we 
count those vast Catholic and Greek populations 
that are yet superstitious and idolatrous adherents 
to a form of Christianity, such as those of South Amer- 
ica and the masses of Russia, and add to them the 
worshipers in the ancient and degenerate churches, 
such as those of the Copts, the Armenians, and the 
Nestorians, the number will be increased by 150,- 
000,000 more. If we estimate the number of Prot- 
estants at a round 200,000,000, there yet remains a 
like number of Roman and Greek Catholics, among 
whom the millions dwelling in exclusively Catholic 
lands have great need of a higher social plane of life, 
to say nothing of the needs of a correct religious con- 
ception of the exclusive place of Christ in our faith, 
of freedom of conscience, and a conception of the 
practical oneness of religion and righteousness. 

If for the sake of our immediate problem we con- 
fine ourselves to those peoples who are non-Christian, 
we are almost appalled at the vastness of the under- 

14 209 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

taking. Here are 200,000,000 Mohammedans who 
have scarcely been touched. Their vigor as a mis- 
sionary force has been overestimated, but they are 
practically the only missionary religion outside Chris- 
tianity, and that they are pushing an active propa- 
ganda in the Soudan and south into Equatorial Africa. 
The Senussi of the Soudan have a definite organization 
for propaganda, and are imbued with all the fanatical 
intolerance of the old-time Moslem. In India Islam 
makes progress over the native faiths, largely because 
it destroys caste and appeals to the millions that are 
under its thralldom among the lower and out-castes, 
but India is a free country and Mohammedans are 
won to Christianity. Turkey is opening to the message 
and Moslems are among the inquirers. Freedom of 
the press and of speech can not long prevail without 
freedom of action following. The process may be 
slow, but "the mills of God grind slowly." Persia 
is awakening and Mohammedan children are found 
in her mission schools. In Africa the creeping frontier 
line could be successfully turned back by a strong 
line of mission stations from Uganda to the Congo. 
Islam is not insuperable, though she presents the great- 
est need for strategy in the statesmanship of the modern 
missionary church. 

India's 300,000,000 present the greatest social 
need of any of the older lands. She is the oldest of the 
great missionary fields and there is within her borders 
to-day a Christian community, counting those who 
have openly accepted the Christ and those whose 
lives are more or less ordered after the tenets of Chris- 
tianity, though not openly associated with any Chris- 

210 



THE SOCIAL WAY OF UNITY 

tian communion, of 5,000,000 souls. This is a small 
proportion, but when we compare it with historic 
parallels it is very encouraging, and if we could measure 
the leavening influence of the missionary force upon the 
social and national life of the people, we should be fairly 
astounded at its success. Sir Augustus Rivers Thomp- 
son called the missionaries the "true saviors of the 
empire," and Sir Andrew Fraser told a convention 
of commercial men that out of thirty years' experience 
as a government administrator in India, he was con- 
vinced that the missionary had done more for her 
uplift than all other agencies combined. But India's 
multitudes are yet under the thralldom of super- 
stition and in bondage to caste. Famine devastates 
her and a million die in one section while plenty is 
enjoyed in another, yet there will be little charity. 
Millions live in squalor and die of plague and prevent- 
able diseases because they have no physician. She 
is a vast and rich land, and science and the spirit of 
humanity would make her equal to all her problems, 
but she is blinded by her superstitions and enslaved 
by her anti-social customs. 

China's 350,000,000 are in the dawn of the most 
stupendous change history will have to record. The 
great lethargic giant is yawning after two millenniums 
of sleep, and what he will do when fully conscious of 
his powers will depend upon the manner in which we 
deal with him. He is naturally peaceable and a lover 
of industry. If we touch China with that " enchanter's 
wand" which Darwin found in missionary benevolence, 
it may be won to the Kingdom of God through those 
peaceable works whose fruit is righteousness. Sir 

211 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

Robert Hart warned the encroaching nations that they 
"thought China moved too slowly." "Some day," 
said he, "you will think she moves too fast." There 
the masses labor for from six to ten cents per day and 
devote hundreds of millions to votive offerings at the 
altars of their false gods. Corruption has reigned 
so long in all governmental circles that their efforts 
at material progress will entail vast burdens upon the 
toiling masses through the historic methods of 
"squeeze." They have not that sense of truthful- 
ness without which a vast commercial life can never 
be builded. Indirection characterizes their inter- 
course, and lack of accuracy makes the forward way 
tortuous. " China," said President Angell, once Ameri- 
can High Commissioner to Peking, "will never be re- 
deemed until she bows the knee to Christ." It is not 
necessary to recount the story of her suffering millions, 
even in times of plenty. Poverty is omnipresent, 
and epidemic disease is reckoned up to spirit forces. 
Until she receives that Christianity which one of her 
scholars described as so wonderfully opening the "eye 
of the mind," she will not successfully be made anew. 
Japan's crowded areas have scarcely been touched 
by the missionary evangel. Her millions are digging 
sustenance out of her mountain heights and searching 
for it in the sea. These masses have scarcely been 
touched by Christianity. The middle and upper 
classes have heard the message, and ten have been made 
better by it for every one who has openly identified 
himself with it in the churches. Prince Ito was one 
of the party Verbeck sent around the world that they 
might see what civilization had to offer. In the days 

212 



THE SOCIAL WAY OF UNITY 

of the Revolution he thought Japan needed our Western 
science and education and all the arts of our material 
and intellectual progress, but said that their religion 
was good enough for them. In his later life he com- 
mended Christianity for its ethical code, and said that 
had it not come to his country its young men would 
have been plunged into excesses of immorality. Count 
Okuma counsels the youth of Japan to practice the 
morals of Christianity, and says that without it the 
developing nation can not hope to endure, for Christian 
morality is the sure foundation of progress ; the 
thousands that are taught in his school are instructed 
in Christian morals. Japan needs a morality that 
will redeem her youth from loose habits and elevate 
her women to a place beside her men. The 40,000,000 
common people have scarcely been touched by the 
missionary evangel, and a revived Buddhism offers a 
new challenge among the more educated. 

Africa is yet an unoccupied continent. Vast areas 
of her inner plateaus are unoccupied, and tens of mil- 
lions have not yet heard that there is a Christ or a 
Christian civilization. Millions are yet held in slavery 
in her interiors and cannibalism is still practiced by 
many tribes. Woman is a chattel, home is unknown, 
war is the vocation of millions, suspicion paralyzes 
social life, and humanity lives on a plane little above 
that of the beasts about it. In the Soudan are un- 
explored states as vast as Texas, and lines of travel 
from 3,000 to 5,000 miles in length have no missionary 
station. The Dark Continent is scarce touched, 
though where she has been laid under the missionary 
conquest she has furnished veritable Pentecosts, and 

213 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

the story of the new way of life that has sprung up 
over the old unspeakable degradation has been like 
that of Alladin's lamp. 

Space will not permit an account of Tibet, just 
opened to the Gospel after thirty years of waiting at 
the Moravian outpost in the Himalayas; of the Steppes 
of Central Asia, with their millions of nomads who live 
as the ancients did before the days of Abraham; of 
Siberia, with its frozen stretches of sparsely inhabited 
territory, and of the islands of the sea where the vileness 
of man reaches its lowest degree, but where the story 
of Fiji and the New Hebrides can be retold a hundred 
times if only the evangel be sent. Suffice it to say that 
if the marvelous success of missions in the past fifty 
years is a challenge to greater undertakings, the vast- 
ness of the field yet untouched and the need of ex- 
tension in the lands already entered constitute a call 
that is tragical in its tone, but that is never discouraging 
in the light of missionary history, nor in the promises 
of the God of Nations. To do the work calls for more 
than the vision and the consecration of the churches; 
it calls for efficiency at the task as well, for no amount 
of enthusiasm will avail if it be not so directed as to 
bring the greatest results. The call for missionary effi- 
ciency is a call to unity. Where one puts a thousand 
to flight, two will chase their ten thousand. The 
church dare not present other than a united front to 
the need and to the opportunity. 



214 



THE SOCIAL WAY OF UNITY 



2. The Things that Unite, and the Things that 
Divide. 

Men rarely differ on their knees, nor in the presence 
of a recognized human need. Mercy is not denomina- 
tionalized, nor has charity ever been the means of 
separating Christian peoples into sects. There is 
no record of a division in Christendom being brought 
about by the doing of good, unless, mayhap, it was 
by some who protested against doing it. The great 
unifying incentive is a recognition of the task to be 
undertaken. The great unifying spirit is an enthusi- 
asm for humanity. Jesus prayed that his disciples 
should always be united, in order that the world might 
believe he was sent for its salvation. The force that 
unites is taking hold of the church in its rising recog- 
nition of the needs of the world and the coming of the 
faith that convinces it of Christianity's power to save 
all men, regardless of race, clime, color, station, or 
previous condition. The spirit that unites is taking 
hold of the church in the coming of that social con- 
science which Prof. Francis Peabody characterizes 
as the "greatest discovery of the age." It is the social 
call, the call of humanity that unites. 

The major divisions within the church arose over 
questions of conscience. In the larger number of 
cases they came because the church, as constituted, 
forced the advocates of some new doctrine out of their 
fellowship with the intolerance that characterized the 
age. Many of the smaller cleavages have been effected 
by mere differences of opinion, or by some sectional 
or minor difficulty that took root in a time which em- 

215 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

phasized liberty of opinion to the detriment of efficiency 
in action. But to-day the great contentions for con- 
science sake have been won and have become the pos- 
session of all the churches. Sectarianism stands to- 
day as an arrested development. There are no great 
essentials that longer divide Protestant Christianity 
into denominations. It is the hold of tradition, the 
historic continuities, the prejudices of early training, 
and questions of form and polity, that keep up the 
walls of division. 

The question of unity is not only one of more love 
and loyalty to Christ, but one of less fealty to the de- 
nomination as well. The plea that various denomina- 
tions present various phases of truth to fit various 
types of mind falls down utterly before a candid search 
of fact. On the mission field the practice of "delimi- 
tation of territory " annuls such an apology. If Metho- 
dists take one field and Baptists another in the Philip- 
pines, is it because men have searched and found that 
one district presents a type of mind that the one de- 
nomination fits and the other does not? It is simply 
because there is a great need, and in its presence all 
thought of "types of mind " is lost and the two denomi- 
nations agree together, that, in the interest of their 
great common cause, they will not divide communities 
and compete for souls, but will co-operate for their 
evangelization. And they each find that the other 
makes quite as good Christians as itself. Missions 
are saddled with our home divisions, but are trying 
to meet the issue on the lines of least resistance. 

One of the dramatic moments of the Edinburgh 
Conferences was when a native Chinese delegate ad- 

216 



THE SOCIAL WAY OF UNITY 

dressed the gathering with a plea for union. He re- 
minded the assembled delegates that whatever our 
traditional differences meant to us, they meant nothing 
to them. Bishop Root says we must lead the Chinese 
churches into union or forfeit our right to leadership. 
In Japan the mission churches tend to unity as rapidly 
as they become self-supporting. On no field would 
the denominational divisions long prevail if the churches 
were self-supporting, nor will they after self-support 
is possible. The forms of government and the creedal 
statements we have taken to them are barriers, but 
they will not be insuperable, for while we have been 
using them in our evangelization we have been so 
dominated by the unifying spirit of Christ in the real 
fundamental work we have been doing, that the spirit 
will conquer the letter, and union will win over form. 
At the New York Ecumenical Conference in 1900 
the missionaries pleaded for unity and the delegates 
from home for comity only. At the Edinburgh Con- 
ference in 1910 missionaries denounced sectarianism 
as a sin and all pleaded for union in the task. Union 
is coming by way of the mission field. At home we 
have a Christian civilization and are satisfied. On the 
mission field there is a pagan or a savage state of so- 
ciety, and the missionary is confronted by such ap- 
palling necessities that he is driven to unite all forces 
to effect their overthrow. The churches at home are 
less concerned about co-operation in just the measure 
that they are less concerned about Christianizing the 
whole earth. To the missionary, confronted by the 
appalling evils of heathenism, opinions, traditions, 
forms of worship, and methods of church government 

217 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

count for little, and the victory over heathenism counts 
for everything. Their infant churches are surrounded 
by heathen practice and need all the help unity can 
give. Here at home we are afflicted with a social 
inertia that makes movements away from the old moor- 
ings difficult. Out on the frontier the worker thinks 
less of what means he shall use than that he shall use 
the most effective means that can be devised. They 
hold fast to eternal principles, but they are much more 
ready to adopt working expedients and become all 
things to all men, if by any means they may win some. 
They are doing what Dr. J. P. Jones, for twenty-five 
years a Congregational missionary in India, pleads 
that we all do, i. e., " Place more emphasis on the King- 
dom of God." We will then, he adds, " Cease to at- 
tach so much importance to forms of church organiza- 
tion," and he might have added, as indeed he does 
in other words and in many ways, to opinions and 
traditional attachments, and to all else that keeps us 
apart. 

It is emphasis on the Kingdom of God that is most 
needed. On the mission field the conception that 
Christianity is to be planted in the life and custom 
of the people is well grounded. Once men went with 
the idea of merely rescuing whom they could from the 
lost masses of heathenism. They believed every pagan 
faith to be at enmity with God, and entertained little 
hope of rescuing whole civilizations and races to a Chris- 
tian manner of living. To-day the typical missioner 
finds much in the native religions that are voices in the 
wilderness, pointing to a better way, and he seeks to 
show how Christianity fulfills their inadequate leadings. 

218 



THE SOCIAL WAY OF UNITY 

He discovers hidden lodes of human wealth under the 
debris of heathenism and seeks to bring it to light by 
his Christian appeal. He pursues the gospel method 
of winning men one by one, but looks upon each one 
as new leaven in the lump of native life about him, and 
lives in the faith that it will take only a considerable 
minority of such transformed lives to begin to lift up 
the whole mass. When the leaven begins to work he 
has a vast force to aid him in the amending social 
ideals of the unconverted multitudes. Every art that 
adds to the comfort of life, every moral compulsion 
that brings a little more of the saving salt of righteous- 
ness, every ideal that adds a new star in the pall of 
darkness and lightens the pathway to unguided feet, 
every constraint of mercy that softens the heart of 
heathen hardness, every newly awakened human sym- 
pathy, every newly welded bond of patriotism, every 
abandoned cruelty in ancient custom, and all else that 
adds to the joy of living, increases fraternity, culti- 
vates sympathy and confidence in human kind, and 
makes life better worth living, he counts as a part of 
that "more abundant life" Jesus came to give to men, 
and as a contribution to the coming of that Kingdom 
of God he came to establish in the earth. 

Missionaries find no difficulty in co-operating in 
those things that all the world recognizes as matters 
of Christian charity and righteousness. In those 
things does the Kingdom of God consist and for them 
the church was founded. It is only in the measure 
that Christendom has become concerned over the means 
whereby the world shall be saved, more than it has 
over the saving of the world, that it has neglected 

219 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

"righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit," 
while tithing the mint, anise, and cummin of ologies 
and polities. Less zeal for an ism and more for the 
weal of men will unite the church in the course of time. 
There is no denominationalism in easing pain or curing 
bodies; why should there be in "binding up the broken- 
hearted," or in the "cure of souls?" The missions 
co-operate in medical schools and in education. They 
operate mission presses in co-operation. They present 
a united front in appeals to governments, and in pro- 
tests against their detractors. The Mission to Lepers 
finds no difficulty in operating through all missions. 
The Christian Literature Societies of China and India 
and the Religious Tract Society find all doors open to 
their contributions to the common cause. Union is 
easy in doing famine or flood or epidemic relief work. 
United effort has been exerted against such crying 
social evils as slavery, foot-binding, infanticide, the 
treatment of woman, the opium traffic, caste, the liquor 
trade, the Congo atrocities, and every other form of 
evil that afflicts or threatens humanity. To build 
two medical schools where one would give more pro- 
ficient training, or to put hospitals into competition, 
would not be thought of on the mission field to-day. 
Books are translated by union committees and used 
by all. The missions in Japan, West China, and South 
India issue year books that treat the field as a unity 
and emphasize the co-operation existing. The Chinese 
Recorder and Missionary Journal, the West China 
Missionary News, and the United Church Herald 
of South India are union journals, and many others 

220 



THE SOCIAL WAY OF UNITY 

co-operate in publication. All contiguous missions 
meet for prayer and conference. 

There is no division in regard to the great funda- 
mentals of doctrine. All missionary communions hold 
to the Fatherhood of God, the Lordship of Christ, the 
sufficiency of the Scriptures as a rule of faith and 
practice, and to the church as representing the living 
body of the Savior. Each believes that the others are 
Christian and that they are helping to bring the King- 
dom of God into the earth — why should they not 
labor together to bring it more quickly? 

3. Breaking Down the Walls of Division. 

The divisions of Protestantism are not ancient, 
nor are they final. No one denomination expects to 
absorb all others and become the final church. All 
recognize that the needs of the world are not met by 
the things that divide, but by the things that unite. 
But union will not be the thing of a day, nor will it 
ever be effected by resolution. Neither will it come 
through ecclesiastical agreement, but it will come 
through the gradual drawing together of the churches 
by the inspiration of an overpowering common ob- 
jective, and by actual co-operation in the common 
tasks. 

The overwhelming present need is the drawing 
together of the workers in the common task. It is 
through unity and co-operation that union will come. 
The tendencies are shown in great inter-missionary 
conferences like the Decennial Conference in India, 
the fourth of which is about to be held; the South 

221 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

African Conference, three of which have already been 
held; the Shanghai Conference, which was the first 
of a series that will become a regular feature of the 
work in China; the regular Japanese meetings for all 
missions, and the great Pan-Islamic Conference; all 
these are cultivating the way to larger co-operation. 
Sectional conferences are held in almost every field 
where there are contiguous stations. City associa- 
tions are uniformly organized in all the mission centers. 
Departmental meetings to consider various phases of 
the work cross denominational lines; they are held 
to consider such problems as education, medical work, 
literary output, work for women, and industrial train- 
ing. Such conferences make the workers acquainted 
and emphasize to their minds the advantages in co- 
operation and the power in common effort. 

In India, West China, and South Africa, Boards 
of Arbitration have been established. They decide 
all matters of difference and help to formulate concrete 
ways and means for co-operation. In the first of these 
thirty missions are united, every mission board but 
two accepting the co-operation. In the second 
every mission and board operating in the territory 
have joined, and in the last all but one. In the Philip- 
pines all but the Episcopalians have entered the 
"Iglesia Evangelica," or Evangelical Church, and the 
field is divided so as to prevent overlapping. In 
Japan all but the high church Anglicans and the 
American Episcopalians are in the union for promotion 
of "The Christian Movement in Japan." In Korea 
the Methodist and Presbyterian bodies have divided 
the field, and in making the readjustment transferred 

222 



THE SOCIAL WAY OF UNITY 

churches and members from one communion to the 
other, and that without friction. Indeed, it seemed 
to add vigor to their common cause. In West China 
free interchange of members is practiced. India is 
working to the same end and many missions practice 
it independently. The mission church can not deny 
fellowship to one who bears the name of Christ and 
who is almost sure to be lost amid the overpowering 
influences of the old heathen life if he is out of fellow- 
ship with his brethren; fellowship is given even if 
full membership is not. 

In facing Western civilization China recognizes 
that the school offers the royal road to progress, and 
she is founding a national school system. The mis- 
sionaries are confronted with the task of injecting 
Christian morals into the new learning of the empire. 
They find it necessary and easy to rise above de- 
nominational lines in giving instruction. Equipment 
and an able teaching force can not be provided other- 
wise. Efficiency counts for everything in creating 
the new education for that empire, for they have long 
had scholarship and have keen minds for learning. 
The Nankin University is a union of Methodist, Dis- 
ciple, and Presbyterian schools. In West China the 
new university at Chengtu is being founded by the 
co-operation of all the great missionary societies work- 
ing there, and the charter provides that all new- 
comers may have a part in its management upon enter- 
ing the field. In North China the British Congrega- 
tionalists and the Presbyterians have a joint Education 
Association that manages four colleges, supported by 
these two bodies. In Korea the colleges are union 

223 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

institutions. In India Madras College, one of the 
famous old Christian schools, has followed the example 
of the older denominational institutions in the United 
States by becoming independent and interdenomina- 
tional. The famous Doshisha in Japan is practically 
the same. In Shangtung, China, English Baptists, 
American Presbyterians, and Anglicans co-operate 
in the management of three colleges, and will unite 
them into a university after the English plan. All 
over China the movement for the standardization 
of all mission schools is progressing, and secretaries 
to superintend it will be supported jointly. The 
tendency is strong there for union colleges with Bib- 
lical seminaries grouped about them. Yale College 
at Hankow, Christian College at Canton, and the uni- 
versity projected by Oxford and Cambridge at Han- 
kow, are examples of the effort being made for the 
education of China by Christian influences that are 
broader than denominational interests. There are 
union theological schools at Tokio, Bangalore, Nanking, 
and Amoy. In Manila a union university is being 
projected. In Central China a movement is on looking 
toward the founding of a great union training school 
for evangelists and native teachers. The leaders of 
the future church in the mission field will not defend 
sectarian differences after being educated in the same 
schools and by the united effort of several denomina- 
tional boards. In the field of medical training there 
is little division of effort. In Peking five great so- 
cieties support one superb school. A like project 
is under way at Chengtu, in connection with the new 
union university there, and Nanking University is 

224 



THE SOCIAL WAY OF UNITY 

seeking to found another. Hospitals are supported 
by denominational societies, but they know no de- 
nominational lines in their work; at Iloilo Presbyterians 
and Baptists have united in the support of one. All 
medical associations are union, as are all educational 
associations. There is no division in the doing of 
good. Union evangelistic efforts are found feasible, 
and every co-operative effort brings to light new and 
mightier means for evangelizing the world. 

It is very natural for union sentiment to bring 
about the amalgamation of subdivisions in the larger 
denominational bodies. This is taking place to a re- 
markable degree on the mission fields. The best 
known instance is that of the Presbyterian and Re- 
formed bodies in Japan. Six different synodical 
bodies have united there and taken the name, "Church 
of Christ in Japan." The eight Presbyterian bodies 
in China have divided the empire into six districts, 
or synods, and are moving toward a national Presby- 
terian church. It is to be hoped they will adopt the 
same unifying name they are using in Japan. In 
India seven churches with the Presbyterial, or rep- 
resentative, form of government have united into The 
Presbyterian Church in India, while the four working 
in Korea have formed an independent Presbyterian 
Church for that Kingdom. The synodical form of 
government seems to make union easy, because of its 
representative character. The Episcopal form lends it- 
self less easily to such amalgamation, as each bishopric 
has a fealty to preserve. In Japan they have a work- 
ing union that promises a national church with Episco- 
pal government. The Methodists have already united 
15 225 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

there and have a native bishop. As is usual, the native 
churches found means for union easy; the churches 
that were supporting them from- the home field found 
assent more difficult. The various Lutheran bodies 
in all Asiatic fields are moving toward union. In 
India the various Baptists bodies are uniting. In 
Madagascar the Congregationalists and other inde- 
pendents found no difficulty in getting together, and 
likewise in Amoy, China. The more democratic 
churches of Congregational government have done 
less in a formal way, but practice a degree of unity 
that no other missions do, just because there are fewer 
formalities in the way. Their conferences answer 
informally where more highly governed ecclesiastical 
bodies must have formal agreements. 

But the union of denominational families is not 
final. It is a step forward, but the main lines of di- 
vision are still preserved. Geographical union, or 
the union of all bodies within a certain territory, is 
union indeed. This crosses all lines of division and 
considers only the common good. The Shanghai 
Conference resulted in the " Christian Federation of 
China," whose purpose is "to encourage the sentiment 
and practice of union," and "to hasten the establish- 
ment of the Kingdom of God in China." They ap- 
pointed a committee to stimulate every kind of co- 
operation and union effort. In Japan the older Evan- 
gelical Alliance is undertaking the same kind of effort. 
At Nairobe, in East Africa, eight missions, representing 
bodies as far apart as Baptists and Episcopalians, have 
formed a like working alliance. In West China, one 
ofjthe virgin fields and a leader in all such forward 

226 



THE SOCIAL WAY OF UNITY 

movements, an Advisory Council has been effective for 
ten years, and has now issued a declaration favoring 
"one Protestant Christian Church for West China." 
They practice free interchange of members just as 
the churches of one communion do, and all are happy 
in the fraternal concord of it. In India, after nearly 
every mission body had passed resolutions favoring 
it, the great Interdenominational Conference, held at 
Jubbulpore in 1909, organized "The Federation of 
Christian Churches in India." They welcome to 
membership "all churches and societies that believe 
in God through Jesus Christ, and that accept the word 
of God as contained in the Old and New Testaments 
as the supreme rule of faith and practice." They ap- 
pointed provincial councils and committees on unity, 
and directed them to secure actual union wherever 
possible. They are endeavoring to find a basis for the 
interchange of members, and are cultivating a sense of 
oneness in the native mind, preparatory to that actual 
union which they pray may come. The problems of 
baptism and the form of church government present 
the most formidable obstacles. 

The most significant of all union movements, 
however, has been brought to successful conclusion 
in South India, the oldest of all mission fields, and the 
scene of the greatest missionary successes offered in 
lands where there is a native culture. It is the most 
significant because it is the first complete unification 
of different denominational bodies yet effected on a 
large scale, and because it gives promise of what other 
mission fields may do as they grow older and more 
mature in their native conceptions of Christianity. 

227 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

Previous to 1907 the various Congregational bodies 
in South India united into one organic communion. 
In that year they invited the Presbyterian bodies 
to affiliate with them. The overture was accepted, 
and release was asked from the synod of the Presby- 
terian Church of India. This was granted, and a 
union church of 140,000 members was organized under 
the name of the South India United Church. Ne- 
gotiations are now being carried on with the German 
Reformed and Lutheran bodies working in that sec- 
tion, and there are signs of promise that not only 
they, but, in course of time, all bodies of Christians 
in South India will come into the union, and there 
will be one simple Christian Church that will rank in 
members with many of the Christian communions 
at home. 

The Edinburgh Commission on Co-operation and 
Union found many difficulties in the way of actual 
organic union, but declared that somewhere beneath 
them all must be found the deeper unities and the true 
spirit of Christ, in which alone we can answer his 
prayer for union. 

4. The Day of Opportunity. 

That eminent missionary statesman, John R. 
Mott, in his recent book entitled, "The Decisive 
Hour of Christian Missions/' says that in the face of 
the opportunities of to-day, overlapping, waste, and 
friction on the mission field are sinful. He contends 
that the question of union is not primarily doctrinal, 
but moral. God holds the church responsible for the 
conquest of the world, and if she allows the victory 

228 



THE SOCIAL WAY OF UNITY 

to wait and men to be lost while she bickers over tra- 
ditions and opinions and politics, she is morally guilty 
of a recreancy to opportunity. Mr. Mott says, "The 
hope of real success in taking the gospel to all the non- 
Christian world in our day is in a campaign character- 
ized by the spirit of unity." If the church were one, 
as the Master prayed, the world would soon be led to 
believe. Instead of millions wasted in duplicating 
plants for church work at home, it could be sent where 
the need was greatest. Villages with five churches 
could be well provided with edifices, be ministered 
unto by a much better type of preaching, pay more 
adequate salaries, and send as much as they keep for 
home work to the more needy tasks of the foreign 
field. Great city congregations that build magnificent 
edifices on opposite corners and spend tens of thousands 
on competing orators and choirs could make every 
slum and foreign quarter of the city a missionary 
parish, and then send tens of thouasnds to those who 
never heard the gospel they hold in common but follow 
in division. Money spent on denominational estab- 
lishments for the sake of specific sectarian propaganda 
would reach a multitude with a healing hand where 
it opens wounds of discord in the body of Christ here 
at home. The missionary is less concerned about 
the things that divide. Christ is all in all to him be- 
cause the need is so great and Christ alone is sufficient. 
Hudson Taylor said the China Inland Mission "re- 
garded it of secondary importance by whom the 
sheaves were garnered." "Our divisions inflict serious 
wounds on the body of Christ," said a missionary at 
the Edinburgh Conference. But union will never 

229 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

come by conference or by platform; it will come by 
the overpowering force of a great objective. When 
the church sees the world as its Master saw it, they 
will unite for the specific purpose of saving it to his 
manner of life. 

Opportunity calls for a conservation of forces. 
Never before were such openings offered. All the 
world is now practically explored, and with the opening 
of Tibet and Afghanistan the last of the closed lands 
are opened. There are regions in the Soudan where 
fanaticism would protest and doubtless make its 
martyrs, but that it can be entered is already proven. 
Vast areas of Central Asia are yet not pre-empted, 
but the work in Manchuria could be duplicated in 
many places there. The great Moslem world is yield- 
ing to a more tolerant attitude, and in Russia, Persia, 
and Turkey, Mohammedans are willing to listen to 
the Christian message. "Religion has been the cause 
of race hatreds and individual hatreds, but now we 
are learning that religion may be, and is the greatest 
band to bind us together into a great fellowship in the 
Fatherhood of a common God," said one of the leaders 
of New Turkey. Christianity should take the bond 
of unity to a man like that. Korea is reaping the great- 
est returns of any field open to-day, but there are mil- 
lions not won in Korea, and nothing could so dis- 
courage the native church as a spirit of divisiveness 
or the competition of denominational enterprise for 
their fealty. Siam is as open as Korea, and Mada- 
gascar is again under the rule of a favorable governor. 
All Africa is ready for a Pentecost if only a generation 
of time be given and an army of efficient men and wo- 

230 



THE SOCIAL WAY OF UNITY 

men be sent. China is so accessible that a prominent 
missionary there says no land is more open; it is cer- 
tainly more tolerant and open to a free message to-day 
than Russia. Japan has passed through her era of 
reaction and opposition and is yielding as never be- 
fore; the church made a gain of 70% there in the last 
decade. The ferment in India will issue in a new in- 
terest in the larger things of the world, and Christian- 
ity will reap a great harvest; already there is an un- 
surpassed opportunity to garner among the 50,000,000 
low and out-castes and to compete with Islam for their 
fealty. Among the aboriginal tribes of West China 
there have been great ingatherings, but to introduce 
a divided church among them would be to hinder them 
and lose many. There is no way to answer this call 
of the cross adequately except by a united effort. 
John Mott believes that a union of forces to-day would 
double the effectiveness of the host upon the field; 
it would certainly more than double the power of the 
church at home to occupy the territory open. 

The peoples of the earth are to-day awakened by 
the new internationalism. The victory of Japan over 
Russia, the peaceful revolution of China and Turkey, 
the vast spread of commerce, the awakening that the 
missionary has taken into every quarter of the globe, 
the quickened means of transportation, the railways 
into the heart of Africa and China and across Arabia, 
the recognition of the Orient in international confer- 
ences, the unrest of India, the opening of the great 
Soudan by England and France, the drawing of the 
nations together in The Hague Tribunal, the universal 
dissemination of cheap literature, the new peace and 

231 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

the promised prosperity of South America, and the 
universal progress of democracy in all the nations 
have opened the minds of men as they have never been 
opened before. Old prejudices and provincialism are 
on the wane and a larger view of the world is becoming 
universal. The spirit of national independence is 
growing among subject peoples, learning is becoming 
universalized, and science is spreading its evangelism 
of fact where superstition has reigned; all too often 
learning has taken with it a spurious and short-visioned 
skepticism, and commerce a materialism that will be 
difficult to uproot, once it is well attached to a people. 
Wars may arise in the friction that comes with a new 
found independence, racial hatreds will grow as subject 
races cultivate patriotism and a sense of independence, 
the customary haughtiness of a "superior" race will be 
resented by the rising of "inferior" peoples, and unless 
there is a gospel of peace to spread an effective evangel, 
trouble will be an inevitable accompaniment of the 
new age. If the nations and peoples are allowed to 
open minds to the larger world and to judge it by its 
past treatment of them, and by the spirit of the trader 
and politician alone, there can be only resentment in 
their hearts; but if there can be sown in their hearts 
the message of humanity, the truth of Christianity 
as distinct from the acts of so-called Christian men and 
nations, the confidence it gives every man in the better 
nature of himself and of his fellow-man, and the in- 
spiring facts that history has to tell the unbiased mind 
of its contributions to the evolution of civilization, 
the new world that is to come may be born without 
the birthpangs of medievalism, and the evangel of 

232 



THE SOCIAL WAY OF UNITY 

peace will become the harbinger of a true internation- 
alism founded upon brotherly love. 

The native church on the mission field desires 
union. It will be a sad blow to its future effective- 
ness if we insist on drilling it in our traditions and set- 
ting its plastic life firmly into our Western moulds. 
Mr. Chang Ching-Yi, one of the leaders of the native 
Chinese church, said at the Edinburgh Conference: 
"Speaking plainly, we hope to see in the near future 
a united Christian church without any denominational 
distinctions. It is not your particular denomination 
that you are working for, but for the establishment 
of the Church of Christ in China." "I can conceive 
of no figure of speech that will justify division of the 
church," said J. Campbell Gibson, of China, one of the 
greatest of living missionaries; "the church is the body 
of Christ in Scriptural figure, and to divide it is to 
rend it and to give it pain and to destroy its useful- 
ness." The great tasks of evangelism and the planting 
of both Christian character and Christian philan- 
thropy in the mission field is to be largely the work 
of the native church. What could be more disastrous 
than to divide the forces and set them in competition; 
what more wasteful than to leave them a spirit of con- 
tention, and what less of the spirit of Christ than to 
turn their minds against one another when millions 
await their united efforts. The call of the time is 
that the evangel shall be effective, that the day be 
hastened, and that the native church be panoplied 
with the instruments of a holy warfare, and not bur- 
dened down with the useless weapons of tradition, 
Western opinion, or any sort of divisiveness. 

233 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

If it was the desire of the Savior's heart that the 
nations should be at peace, we shall best lead them if 
we are united ; if it was his desire that they should have 
his gospel and his prayer that his disciples be one that 
the world might believe, we shall best serve him by at 
least refraining from carrying our divisions to the mis- 
sion field; if it be our own desire that the church be 
in that unity that will make it effective in the world 
and pleasing to its great head, we shall best realize 
our desire by enlisting the churches in the overwhelming 
task of bringing the world into his Kingdom. It will 
cost the sacrifice that every great quest costs, but 
no truth will be sacrificed, only our half-truths. It 
will be realized only as we forget self in the mighty 
crusade. 

5. The Call of the Cross. 

What we call the Lord's Prayer was really the dis- 
ciple's prayer. The real Lord's Prayer is that final 
petition which comes to us like a call from the cross. 
It was that we might all be one that the world might 
believe that he was sent. It was not a prayer for mere 
unity and co-operation. It was that we might be 
one, even as he and the Father were one. It was for 
a real and organic unity. It was that the union which 
characterized his disciples at that moment might al- 
ways prevail. A divided church will never conquer a 
world. In the early days of the Reformation the 
leaders openly preached that missions were God's 
business, not ours. They were interested in specula- 
tive theologies, and thought more of correct definitions 
than of evangelizing a world. They thought the doc- 

234 



THE SOCIAL WAY OF UNITY 

trine must be formulated properly or there could be no 
salvation. Luther denounced Zwingli in terms which 
burned with terror because the Swiss reformer differed 
from him in regard to the Lord's Supper. They had 
not learned with Christ that to do the will of God was 
the divine way of learning the true doctrine. Religion 
was more concerned with political affairs than with 
world-wide missions, and it was freely taught that the 
only missionary obligation was that resting upon 
governments in their colonial administrations. Good 
theologians frankly denounced the heathen as unworthy 
of salvation and called some who tried to take the 
gospel to them insane fanatics. As a result there was 
no missionary work of importance during the first 
two centuries after the beginning of the Reformation, 
but there were a number of divisions brought into the 
church, and the spirit that each sect maintained toward 
the other was anything but that of their divine Lord 
in his prayer for their union. That we are not yet 
purged of that ecclesiastical spirit all must acknowledge. 
We shall be under the incubus of it for some time no 
doubt, for there will be narrow-minded partisans, and 
even leaders who will be more devoted to their sect 
than to the Kingdom of God, until the spirit of fra- 
ternity so sweeps over the church that it carries them 
off their feet and hastens them along with a provi- 
dential tide. 

That day is fast approaching when the spirit of 
brotherhood will so seize upon the Church of Christ 
that there will be few apologists left for sectarianism 
and partisanship. The whole tide in the affairs of men 
is toward greater unity. Nations are merging from 

235 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

separated states into more closely annealed unities, 
as witness in our own country, Germany, China, India, 
Australia, and South Africa. The whole world is 
drawing together. The cable and telegraph, the swift 
locomotive and express steamship, wireless and the 
aeroplane, are abolishing distances and making all 
the world acquainted. Intelligence of One another 
brings understanding and abolishes prejudices. Trade 
and travel are welding us together with the metallic 
bonds of common interest. War was once pleaded 
for as a maker of trade and a creator of virile manhood. 
To-day commercial bodies are foremost in denouncing 
it as a destroyer of trade, and sociologists as the great- 
est devastator of the strength of nations. But a little 
while ago, as history records time, nations preyed 
upon one another, and all the world believed that to 
the strong belonged the battle. To-day no nation 
enters an imperialistic campaign without attempting 
to convince all the world that it is in the interests of 
the weaker peoples and for the good of the conquered. 
The interests of humanity are becoming one, and men 
are recognizing that co-operation between nations and 
peoples redound to mutual benefit, and that strife 
is both expensive and uncivilized. 

What is happening between the nations is taking 
place within the nations. Co-operation is the watch- 
word of both industry and commerce. Cut-throat 
competition is expensive and must die the death of all 
survivals of our barbaric life. Men have found that 
they can make more for themselves by agreeing to- 
gether than by trying to get the advantage of one 
another. Labor is discovering that in unity lies its 

236 



THE SOCIAL WAY OF UNITY 

only hope of a better wage and a higher standard of 
living. Co-operation is the watchword of the age, and 
it registers a new era in human progress. 

This spirit of the age is nowhere more manifest 
than in the church. Every city has its evangelical 
alliance, or some organization that corresponds to it. 
Several States have church federations, and the Federal 
Council of Churches is equaled only by the English 
Free Church Council in the magnitude of its meaning 
as a unifier of Christian activities. There are few 
apologists for sectarianism left, and pulpits ring elo- 
quently with union appeals in the name of the common 
faith we profess and the common task we have to do. 
In Canada, South Africa, and Australia genuine 
church union movements are in progress. In South 
Africa a temporary halt has been called, but in Canada 
the churches concerned are voting two to one for the 
merger, and the same majority obtains in Australia. 
In the United States the various Northern Baptist 
bodies are uniting, as are also the Presbyterians, and 
all denominations are conducting negotiations across 
the mythical Mason's and Dixon's line in an effort 
to overcome the unfortunate breaks brought on by the 
Civil War. The same process of first drawing to- 
gether the denominational families into the larger 
denominational unity is operating at home as on the 
mission field. Where they lead we are sure to follow. 
We have the great incubus of tradition, lesser zeal, and 
the vested interests of denominational societies to 
deter us, but awakening missionary interest will imbue 
us with the same spirit that has been moving the real 
missionaries. 

237 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

The most promising sign of the times, however, is 
the universal awakening of the church to its social 
duty. It has moved out of the down-town as the slum 
moved in, and the efforts of the social settlements 
to do what it would not undertake is rebuking it for 
social negligence. It has seen every form of social 
amelioration undertaken by organizations of Chris- 
tians, organized under other names but seldom under 
her auspices, and she is asking why she has been unable 
to meet the need herself. The answer is her divisions. 
She has been taxed to support duplicating church 
organizations and had nothing left, either of money 
or men, to devote to the greater task of social effort. 
She has unsparingly denounced Roman Catholic 
ecclesiastical and doctrinal errors, but been compelled 
to see a united Catholic church rebuke her with a 
charity that is unexampled, and she realizes that it 
is not Catholic doctrine but Catholic unity that has 
made it possible, while it is not Protestant doctrine 
but Protestant divisiveness that has prevented her 
from doing it. The late Amory Bradford said that 
he found in one town in Japan four little Methodist 
missions, each of which had to be visited by a differ- 
ent bishop from home, representing the sub-denomina- 
tional divisions we maintained, and the expense was 
paid by contributions taken in pleas for the heathen. 
The mission churches saw the irony of such a condi- 
tion, and those four missions are to-day one, with 
their own native bishop to superintend their 
work. When the churches at home awaken to an 
economic sense of the waste involved in denomina- 

238 



THE SOCIAL WAY OF UNITY 

tional duplication, they will stop it on the home mission 
field as they are already stopping it on the foreign 
field. " Denominationalism, as a principle, is doomed 
to death," says Canon Hensley Henson, a noted 
Anglican clergyman. It will not be undone in a day, 
for as Robert Speer says, "From the beginning the 
greatest evils have succeeded in rooting themselves 
in the consciences of men," nor will it be done by ec- 
clesiastical procedure, but by the overwhelming power 
of a great objective, such as the conversion of the world 
and the bringing in of the Kingdom of God. 

Missionaries are tremendously impressed with the 
social needs of the world. They make their homes 
social settlements, and adopt institutional methods in 
their churches. They wrestle with the larger social 
problems in their active ministries and grapple with 
the social evils of heathenism with firm and steady 
hands. "The message for China," says Frank Gar- 
rett, of Nanking, Secretary of the Evangelistic Council 
for China, "is the message of the prophets, justice 
and righteousness and God's protecting care. The 
message of Amos rings out as though it were written 
for China to-day. What China needs to-day is men 
of the type of the old prophets of Israel. The leading 
men in the Chinese ministry to-day preach a social 
and national message." Just because this larger con- 
ception of the work of the Kingdom of God has seized 
hold upon them, they have less interest in perpetuating 
divisions. Fraternity is the great social message that 
Christians must bear to the mission fields, and they 
can not do it well with a divided church. ^/They can 

239 



SOCIAL WORK OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS 

not preach the full gospel while their hearers are asking 
why they are divided, if there is but one Christ and one 
way of salvation. So the missionaries in Japan have 
declared that "all who are one in Christ by faith are 
one body," and those in China have united in the dec- 
laration that "in planting the Church of Christ on 
Chinese soil, we desire only to plant one church under 
the sole control of the Lord Jesus Christ." In. Korea 
and the Philippines the missions, with one exception, 
all wear one name and banish the denominational 
title to a parenthesis that can be easily erased. 

The call of the Cross is a call to united service in 
the interests of all humanity and of all that benefits 
humanity. Christ said more about this world than 
any other founder of a great religion. He did not 
neglect the other, nor can we long keep a message for 
this present age if we have not one for the future, but 
his emphasis was upon the need of righteousness. 
Men were to believe unto righteousness; they were 
to seek God and his righteousness; his Kingdom was 
one of righteousness, and he died that men might be- 
come righteous. To do justly, love mercy, and walk 
humbly with God is the world's great social need. 
Religion only can constrain it to such ends, and Chris- 
tianity offers the divine prescription through its Lord. 
When the Christian world is more concerned about 
living Christ than it is about defining him, it will come 
to understand him, but never until then. The mis- 
sionary faces the mighty forces of heathenism and is 
enlisted in service against them. He sees the need of a 
solid front and is leading Christendom into that union, 
both with its Lord and with one another, for which 

240 



THE SOCIAL WAY OF UNITY 

he prayed as he went to the cross to lay down his life 
for the world. 

And what dost thou answer Him, O my soul? 
Is it nothing to thee as the ages roll, 
That the Lord of Life should suffer in vain, 
That He who was Prince in the Realm of Pain, 
Should seek for the sin-stricken children of men, 
That by way of the cross He might bring them again 
To the fold of His care — His infinite care, 
That thou shouldst turn from this, His prayer, 
And deaden thine ear to His wondrous plea, 
The call of the Christ to me? 

— By Claude Kelly, in Missions. 



16 241 



APPENDIX 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The following list of books is selected from among 
those consulted in the preparation of this volume: 

Dennis. (Jas. S.) Christian Missions and Social 
Progress. Three Vols. Revell. 

Mackenzie. (W. D.) Christianity and the Progress 
of Man. Revell. 

Keen. (W. R.) The Service of Missions to Science 
and Philanthropy. Baptist Missionary Union. 

Grant. (W. H.) Philanthropy in Missions. For- 
eign Missions Library, New York. 

Tenny. (E. P.) Contrasts in Social Progress. Long- 
mans. 

Stevenson. (R. T.) The Missionary Interpretation 
of History. Jennings & Graham. 

Mott. (J. R.) The Decisive Hour of Christian Mis- 
sions. Student Volunteer Movement. 

Lindsay. (A. R. B.) Gloria Christi. Macmillans. 

Montgomery. (H. B.) Western Women in Eastern 
Lands. Macmillans. 

Slater. (T. E.) Missions and Sociology. Elliot 
Stock. London. 

Bryan. (W. J.) Letters to a Chinese Official. Mc- 
Clure & Phillips. 

Speer. (R. E.) Christianity and the Nations. Revell. 

Speer. (R. E.) Missions and Modern History. Revell. 

245 



APPENDIX 

Osgood. (Dr. E. I.) Breaking Down Chinese Walls. 
Revell. 

Hunt. (W. R.) Heathenism Under the Searchlight. 
Morgan & Scott. London. 

Faust. (A. K.) Christianity as a Social Factor in 
Japan. University of Pennsylvania. 

Allan. (G. A.) Civilization and Foreign Missions. 
Elliot Stock. London. 

Fowler. (C. H.) Missions and World Movements. 
Jennings & Graham. 

Williamson. (J. R.) The Healing of the Nations. 
Student Volunteer Movement. 

Edwards. (M. R.) The Work of the Medical Mis- 
sionary. Student Volunteer Movement. 

Russel. (Norman.) Village Work in India. Revell. 

Lewis. (R. E.) The Educational Conquest of the 
Far East. Revell. 

Brown. (A. J.) New Forces in Old China. Revell. 

Crafts. (W. E.) Temperance Argument on a Mis- 
sionary Background. The Reform Bureau. 

Griffis. (W. E.) Verbeck of Japan. Revell. 

Report of the Edinburgh Missionary Conference. 
Vols. II, III, VIII. 

Chang Chi Tung. China's Only Hope. Revell. 

Stewart. (J. R.) Dawn in the Dark Continent. 
Revell. 

Hepburn. (J. D.) Twenty Years in Khama's Coun- 
try. Hodder & Stoughton. 

Chalmers. (J as.) Pioneer Life and Work in New 
Guinea. Revell. 

Griffis. (W. E.) A Maker of the New Orient. Revell. 

246 



APPENDIX 

Dye. (Eva N.) Bolenge. Foreign Christian Mis- 
sionary Society. 

Clark. (W. N.) A Study of Christian Missions. 
Scribners. 

Clark. (J. B.) Leavening the Nation. Baker & 
Taylor. 

Weir. (Samuel.) Christianity and Civilization. Eaton 
& Mains. 

Brace. (Loring.) Gesta Christa. A. & C. Armstrong. 

Scmidt. (C.) The Social Results of Early Chris- 
tianity. Isbester. London. 

Uhlhorn. (Gerhardt.) Christian Charity in the Early 
Church. Scribners. 

Nash. (H. S.) The Genesis of the Social Conscience. 
Macmillan. 

Kidd. (Benj.) Social Evolution. Macmillan. 

Patten. (S. N.) The Social Basis of Religion. 
Macmillan. 

Freeman tie. (W. H.) The World as the Subject 
of Redemption. Longmans. 



247 



CLASS QUESTIONS. 

INTRODUCTION. 
Section 1. 

By what means would Jesus save the world? 

In what does personality consist? What relation does it 
bear to the work of missions? 

What is the Kingdom of God? What do we mean by "sav- 
ing the world?" 

Discriminate between a theological and sociological Chris- 
tianity. 

In what way does the work of missions influence the social 
life of a people? 

Discuss missions as a factor in creating a civilization. 

Section 2. 

How does the missionary overthrow false and cruel custom? 

Contrast the average of social life in paganism and Chris- 
tianity. 

Must a people adopt western customs to become Christians? 

Can a people be transformed and made independent by the 
external gifts of civilization alone? Why is the "crea- 
tion of new desires" fundamental? 

Contrast a heathen with a Christian village. 

Enumerate some of the social tasks of missions. 

Discuss the relation of missionary work to social progress. 

Section 3. 

Which religions have been missionary and which not? 
Wherein do Confucianism and Buddhism lack social force? 

What in Mohammedanism makes it anti-social? 
Compare the missionary motive and success of Christianity 

to those of other great religions. 
What has been the secret of Christianity's success as a 

missionary religion? 
What is the effect of missionary work on the moral standards 

of (1) individuals? (2) society? 

Discuss Christianity in comparison with other religions as a 
universal faith. 

248 



APPENDIX 

CHAPTER I. 
Section 1. 

What is the final test of a culture or a religion? 

Which religion has done most to forward progress? Name 
some of the fundamentals it contributes to social prog- 
ress. 

Why is paganism pessimistic and Christianity optimistic? 

Relate wherein each of the great non-Christian religions 
have fallen short as forces for social progress. 

How do pre-Christian civilizations compare to Christian 
civilizations? 

How account for the difference? 

Discuss the secret of social progress in Christian civilizations. 

Section 2. 

Why should missionary statistics be interesting? 

Is Christianity the original faith of any people? What 

in its history justifies the belief that it will become 

the religion of all peoples? 
Relate the progress of missionary work in each of the great 

missionary fields. Give the figures that show the total 

progress of the missionary conquest. 
Enumerate some of the accomplishments of missions that 

figures can not tell. 
How does the generosity of mission churches compare with 

that of the churches at home? What progress is mis- 
sionary interest making at home? 

Discuss the interest of the church in its world-wide task. 

Section 3. 

What makes Christianity the most virile factor in social 

progress? 
What is the difference between a negative and a positive 

statement of the Golden Rule? 
Wherein do the great non-Christian religions fail as leavens 

for social progress? 
How does the personality of Christ contribute to the social 

power of Christianity? 
What is meant by "the sacrifice of service?" How does 

the missionary illustrate it? 

Discuss the nature of Christianity as a social leaven. 

Section 4. 

What was the social status of our Teutonic ancestors be- 
fore the missionary went to them? 

249 



APPENDIX 

What can you say of democracy in Greece? Of the status 
of woman? Of children? Of slaves in Rome? 

What fundamental power in Christianity has always pre- 
served it? 

In what social state did the missionary find the various 
peoples of Europe? How long did it take to transform 
them? How does the progress of missionary work in 
China and Japan compare to that made in Britain, 
Germany, and other historical lands? 

Discuss the comparative progress of modern missions. 

Section 5. 

What evangelistic power is found in ideas? 

What idea is incarnate in the missionary? 

What particular phase of missionary work is winning the 
approval of publicists and statesmen? Why? 

In what does the missionary found progress? What re- 
lation does spiritual transformation bear to material 
progress in his work? 

How does the conversion of individuals to Christianity 
react upon society? 

Discuss the force of ideas as compared with the force of arms as 
a factor in the civilizing process. 

CHAPTER II. 
Section 1. 

What relation must exist between husband and wife to make 

a true home? 
What place does the Koran give woman? 
What part does the family meal play in a Christian and in 

a pagan home? 
How does the position of woman in heathenism compare to 

that given her in Christian lands? 
What mars the patriarchial household as a home? 
What can you say of divorce in non-Christian lands? 
What emphasis does the missionary put upon the home? 

Discuss the Christian home in comparison with the heathen. 

Section 2. 

What position was accorded woman in Greece and Rome? 

Among the Teutons? 
What place did early Christianity give her? Under what 

emperors was she first given greater legal rights? 
Enumerate the gifts of Christianity to her. 

Discuss the relation of "woman's rights" to progress in history. 

250 



APPENDIX 

Section 3. 

State the position of woman in non-Christian lands to-day 

as compared with her position in pre-Christian Europe. 
Describe the lot of Hindu widows. What position do the 

Chinese give woman? The Moslems? What is her 

status in savage society? To what extent is education 

given girls in pagan lands to-day? 
Why are women slowest to accept Christianity? 
Why have the Parsis failed to give India their ideals for 

women? 

Discuss the comparative status of womankind in Christian and 
non-Christian lands to-day. 

Section 4. 

How does the pagan and Christian ideal for child life com- 
pare? 

What was "exposure" of children in Rome? 

What legal rights do non- Christian governments usually 
accord children? 

How widespread was the pagan practice of infanticide? 

What guarantee of right does Christianity alone accord 
children? 

Discuss the influence of the missionary upon child life. 

Section 5. 

What is the social settlement idea? 

How does the missionary home become a settlement? How 

many missionary homes are there? Tell some of the 

concrete ways in which the missionary home conveys 

Christianity to its neighbors. 
Describe some examples of heathen homes and villages. 

Contrast with them those of native Christians. 
What are the main influences of the missionary home? 

Discuss the missionary home as a social settlement. 



CHAPTER III. 
Section 1. 

What part does benevolence play in social progress? 
What can you say for the benevolences of paganism? 
What is the average economic condition in non-Christian 

lands? What result does drouth or flood bring? 
Enumerate some of the inhuman practices of heathenism. 

What change does the missionary bring? 

Discuss "the struggle for others" as a factor in human progress. 

251 



APPENDIX 

Section 2. 

What relation does healing hold to missionary work? What 

use did Jesus make of it? 
What effect does physical depression have on moral life? 
Why does the medical missionary so easily get a hearing? 
Why did Buddhism lose its primitive charity? 
Enumerate the larger influences of the medical missionary. 

Discuss the value of medical missions to missionary work. 

Section 3. 

What is the state of scientific knowledge in China? India? 
Japan? Africa? 

Enumerate some of the medical practices of non-scientific 
lands. 

How does the death rates compare in Christian and non- 
Christian lands? 

What is the fruitful source of disease in non-Christian 
lands? 

What treatment is accorded the insane and lepers in non- 
Christian lands? 

Discuss the value of scientific knowledge to missionary work. 

Section 4. 

How adequately are the medical needs of missionary lands 

met? 
Describe the extent of medical practice under missionary 

auspices. 
What use does the medical missionary make of preventive 

measures? Give instances of phenomenal clinics. 
What does he do in the way of founding a native medical 

profession? Enumerate instances. When will his 

work be done? 

Discuss the influence of the medical missionary upon social 
progress. 

Section 5. 

Relate instances where medical missions have opened doors. 
Why is the physician more able to do this than others? 
Tell how he enlists native benevolence. Give instances. 
Describe the pervasiveness of medical work; the way in 

which it cultivates native sympathy. 
What peculiar work can the woman physician do? 
Give ex-Secretary Foster's estimate of the value of medical 
missions. 
Discuss the evangelistic value of missionary benevolence. 

252 



APPENDIX 

CHAPTER IV. 
Section 1. 

What use does the missionary make of education? Give 
statistics of missionary schools. 

Enumerate some missionary contributions to the literature 
of non-Christian lands. 

How extensively does he supply schools? What does he 
teach in them? Why should he give a general educa- 
tion? 

What is the educational status in non-Christian lands? 

Relate the progress of education in Japan and China. 

What is the fundamental thing in education? How does 
the mission school supply it in comparison with the 
governmental school of a non-Christian land? What 
is the difference between a governmental school in a 
non-Christian land and a public school in a Christian 
land in the teaching of morals? 
Discuss the place of Christian education in civilization. 

Section 2. 

What dangers do mere material gifts take to inferior civil- 
izations? 

How does Christian education supply the fundamental 
elements in a civilizing process? 

Cite instances of missionary education furnishing native 
leadership. 

What is the extent of the influence of educated Christian 
men in Japan? in China? What handicap are they 
under in China? Why? 

What influence does Christianity have on the making of a 
democracy? 

What was Gladstone's test of a religion's efficiency? 
Discuss the place of native leadership in the progress of a people. 

Section 3. 

Is the primitive mind practical? What of its scientific 

habits? Why does the Malaysian refuse to earn wages? 

What fundamental does industrial training supply the 

primitive mind in the creation of social progress? 
What is the ideal of industrial training in mission schools? 
Relate instances where industrial training has created in- 
dustrial communities. 
What fundamental economic factor does civilization supply? 

How does industrial training make it effective? 
How does industrial education react upon the direct pur- 
pose of the missionary in his evangelistic work? 
Discuss the place of industrial habits in social progress. 

253 



APPENDIX 

Section 4. 

Describe the state of female education in China, Japan, 

India, Africa. 
Contrast Christian and pagan ideals of education. 
What is the fundamental necessity for educating womankind? 
What is the practical necessity of all missionary education? 

How applied to the education of girls? 
How does an educated womanhood affect pagan social 

customs? 

Discuss the value of educated mothers to the race. 

Section 5. 

Relate instances where missionary schools have been ef- 
fective evangelizing agencies. 

What effect does missionary education have upon the Mos- 
lem mind? Can it be called an evangelistic agency 
among them? 

What is an "evangelism of preparation?" 

How does the school appeal to the educated caste of a 
pagan land? 

What educational necessity rests upon missions in making an 
effective native church? 

Discuss the reaction of environment upon the evangelistic work 
of missions. 

CHAPTER V. 
Section 1. 

Contrast the motives and benefits brought to a pagan so- 
ciety by the trader, soldier, missionary. 

What is the community influence of the missionary and 
how does he exercise it? 

Contrast the results of paternalism and those of a training 
in the arts of democracy. 

Does white contact necessarily result in the decimation of 
native races? What kind of contact decimates? What 
kind elevates? 

By what means does missionary influence affect the larger 
political, social, and commercial life of a people? 

Discuss the civilizing power of the missionary in contrast to 
those of trade, war, and politics. 

Section 2. 

Are there any democracies among non-Christian govern- 
ments? What type of rule prevails among them? 
How is justice administered? 

254 



APPENDIX 

Quote various authorities on missionary influence in polit- 
ical progress. 

Give instances of direct missionary work and influence in 
transforming the political life of a people. 

What indirect influence does missionary work have on the 
political life of a people? 

Discuss the influence of the missionary in the evolution of modern 
government in mission lands. 

Section 3. 

What is meant by "making two blades of grass grow where 
one grew before?" 

What is the difference between "planting" and "rescuing" 
as a missionary program? 

What part does the creation of new wants play in social 
progress? Relate how missionary work stimulates 
them and give instances of how the missionary has 
supplied them. 

Narrate instances where he has become a "captain of in- 
dustry." 

What fundamental moral sense does he inject into trade 
and industry? 

Discuss the relation of missionary work to material progress. 

Section 4. 

Enumerate ways in which the missionary becomes the 
pioneer of civilization. How does his work contribute 
to trade and commerce? 

In what is the work of the trader inimical to missionary 
work? Give instances of conflict between them. 

How does the missionary prepare a people for the innova- 
tions of civilization? 

Enumerate examples of missionary trading companies. 
What financial relation does the missionary hold to 
them? W T hat special work do they do? 

What special missionary enterprise is advocated by Dr. 
Josiah Strong? Would it be effective as a social in- 
fluence? 

Discuss the value of increased earning power to the higher arts 
of civilization. 

Section 5. 

Enumerate instances of international agreements, confer- 
ences, and federations. 

Name some of the things that make against warfare in our 
time. 

255 



APPENDIX 

Narrate how the nations are "preparing for war in times of 
peace." Who pays the bills finally? 

What two things have been the chief causes of modern war? 
Have missionaries ever directly brought on a war? 
What of the Boxer rebellion? 

Enumerate instances where the missionary has brought 
about peace. 

What faith does the missioner have in the potentiality of 
the least of men? What attitude of mind does he culti- 
vate that makes for peace? 
Discuss the missionary as a factor in the uniting of the nations 

in bonds of comity and peace. 

CHAPTER VI. 
Section 1. 

Give the number of unevangelized. What of the task 
among Moslems? In India? China? Japan? Africa? 
The unoccupied lands? 
What particular promise does each of these missionary 

territories hold out? 
What supreme call comes to the churches in face of the task? 
Discuss the advantage of union among the churches for the sake 
of evangelizing the world. 

Section 2. 

What are the forces that make for Christian union? 
What gave rise to the various denominations? Do the 

original causes still obtain? 
Is there an advantage or disadvantage in divisions on the 

mission field? What advantage in union? How do 

our home divisions hinder unity on the mission field? 
Enumerate spheres of work in which co-operation is found 

easy. 
Give the great fundamentals on which all churches agree. 

Discuss the practicability of a union of churches on the mission 
field. 

Section 3. 

What force will bring union? What is meant by an "over- 
powering common objective?" What are the first 
steps to union? 

Enumerate the great standing conferences of missionaries: 
The permanent Boards of Arbitration. 

Tell of the Methodist and Presbyterian division of the field 
in Korea. What approach to union is found in West 
China? In India? 

256 



APPENDIX 

Enumerate instances of a union support of schools; of union 

within great denominational families. 
What specific efforts are being made for "geographical 

union?" Tell of the South India United Church. 

Discuss the "overpowering common objective" as a means to 
Christian union. 

Section 4. 

What is John R. Mott's judgment on the question of unity? 

What economic gain would come to missionary work through 
union? 

Enumerate specific opportunities that call for a conserva- 
tion of forces. What notable modern movements are 
opening work and preparing the way? What great 
need of a gospel of peace? 

Why should the native church be a united church? What 
sacrifice will it cost the church at home? 

Discuss the value of a united versus a divided native church. 

Section 5. 

Is the intent of the Savior's prayer for unity or for actual 
union? 

What was the attitude of the early leaders in the Reforma- 
tion toward missions? 

Enumerate ways in which the world-wide spirit of unity is 
manifesting itself. How is it manifesting itself in the 
churches at home? What are the chief deterrents? 

How have divisions hindered the church in doing social 
work? How would union help? Contrast Catholicism 
and Protestantism in the direct work of financing 
philanthropic enterprises. Why is the former strongest 
in it? 

What demand does social progress upon the mission field 
make upon the church? Is the church awakening to 
its social duty? What effect will it have upon Christian 
union? 

Discuss the social work of Christianity as a force making for 
Christian union. 



257 



INDEX 

AND 

CROSS REFERENCE INDEX. 

(The italicized words constitute a cross reference index.) 

Africa— 42, 45, 73, 85, 96, 101, 107, 111, 133, 135, 144, 157, 158, 

159, 162, 163, 167, 180, 185, 193, 197, 210, 213. 
American Indian — 180. 
Arab— 37, 51, 71, 76, 137, 231. 
Arbitration, Boards of — 232. 
Asceticism — 114. 

Bhagavad Gita — 50. 

Blantyre— 21, 148, 163, 190. 

Blytheswood — 162. 

Boxer Rebellion— 207. 

Brahmanism— 25, 27, 30, 33, 36, 37, 38, 50, 71, 88, 111, 113, 116, 

145, 155, 164. 
Buddha — (see Buddhism). 

Buddhism— 25, 26, 27, 30, 33, 37,50, 88, 91, 145, 170, 213. 
Buddhist, Young Men's Associations — 135. 
Burmah— 25, 145, 165. 

Cannibalism — 112. 

Caste— 27, 37, 38, 108, 138, 155, 231. 

Charity, Catholic — 238. 

Charity, Christian versus Pagan— 17, 98, 110, 111, 112, 114, 117. 

Charity, The Missionary and — 220. 

Children, In Missionary Lands— 20, 78, 80, 88, 98, 103, 104, 106, 
111, 116, 122. 

China— 21, 26, 35, 36, 37, 41, 44, 45, 63, 66, 67, 71, 76, 84, 87, 88, 

89, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 98, 102, 105, 107, 109, 110, 113, 

119, 120, 122, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 135, 139, 145, 146, 

151, 152, 153, 160, 162, 166, 170, 182, 183, 194, 198, 211, 

> 220, 222, 224 ; 225, 226, 239. 

Chinese — (see China). 

Chivalry — 82. 

Civilizing, The Process of— 15, 33, 35, 36, 37, 39, 49, 52, 56, 67, 
69, 83, 91, 98, 106, 110, 134, 163, 172, 178, 189, 194, 195, 207. 

Conference, The Edinburgh — 216, 227, 230, 233. 

258 



INDEX 

Conference, New York Ecumenical — 217. 

Conference, Shanghai — 226. 

Conferences, International — 201. 

Conferences, Missionary — 221, 222. 

Confucianism— -25, 26, 27, 30, 33, 35, 36, 49, 50, 87, 145, 182. 

Confucius — (see Confucianism). 3 

Constantine's Laws — 80, 95, 98. 

Congo, The— 45, 127, 196. 

Co-operation, The Spirit of — 236, 237. 

Corruption, Chinese Official — 182. 

Critics, The, of Missions — 40. 

Death Rates— 123. 
Denominational Differences — 215. 
Denominational Divisions — 221, 239. 
Divorce in Missionary Lands — 76, 77, 81. 

Egypt— 78, 116, 147. 

Ethics, Christian, in Japan — 29. 

Evil Eye— 119. 

Famines — 98. 

Figis, The— 42, 112, 187, 205, 214. 
Foot-Binding — 126. 
Foot-Binding, Anti, Societies — 96. 

Golden Ages, Pagan versus Christian— 35. 

Golden Rule of Confucius versus Christian — 17, 49. 

Governments, The Missionary and — 181-188. 

Greek Civilization— 58, 60, 79, 80 ; 

Greater Learning, The, of Confucianism — 86. 

Hampton Institute — 159. _ 
Hinduism — (see Brahmanism). 
Hindus — (see India). 

Home, The, Pagan versus Christian— 21, 71-78, 91, 99-105, 192. 
Hospitals, Mission— 117, 119, 126, 128, 129, 135, 137, 220. 
Hygiene, The Missionary and— 92, 103, 114, 126, 129, 130, 131. 
Ideas, The Conquest of— 64, 66, 69, 90, 135, 136, 141, 143, 149, 150, 

172, 174, 178, 188. 
Illiteracy of Paganism— 89, 143, 144, 145, 163, 164, 165. 
India— 25, 37, 41, 42, 43, 45, 74, 75, 85, 86, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96, 

98, 102, 105, 110, 113, 116, 120, 123, 126, 132, 139, 144, 147, 

152, 156, 159, 163, 166, 172, 174, 187, 191, 194, 210, 211, 

226, 227, 231. 
Industrial Education — 155-163, 189. 
Industrial Enterprise of the Missionary — 186-194. 

17 259 



INDEX 

Industry, Missionary a Captain of — 192-194. 
Industry, Native Habits of— 157-160, 190. 
Infanticide — 94, 95. 
Insane, Heathen Treatment of— 125, 132, 193. 

Japan— 21, 25, 42, 44, 63, 73, 76, 77, 85, 89, 107, 108, 118, 129, 
130, 135, 144, 146, 148, 152, 153, 162, 170, 171, 187, 207| 
212, 213, 220, 225, 226, 231, 238, 240. 

Japanese — (see Japan). 

Journals, Missionary — 220. 

Justinian's Laws — 95, 98. 

Justice, Savage Type of — 185. 

Kanaka Traffic— 196. 

Kingdom of God, The— -12, 13, 15, 24, 41, 51, 56, 64, 65, 69, 132, 

142, 208, 218, 219, 221, 234, 235, 239, 240. 
Koran, The— -71, 115, 133, 135, 170, 171. 

Korea— 41, 120, 123, 145, 166, 175, 178, 188, 207, 222, 230, 240. 
Koreans — (see Korea). 

Labor, Dignity of — 60. 

Layman's Missionary Movement— 47. 

Lepers — 126. 

Life, Value of— 28. 

Literati— 171. 

Literature, The Missionary and — 20, 43, 44, 61, 142, 220. 

Literature Societies, Christian — 184, 220. 

Livingstonia— 158, 159, 162, 190. 

Lovedale— 21, 144, 145, 162. 

Manu, The Laws of— 87. 

Material Progress, The Missionary and — 67, 68, 70, 149, 162, 

179, 180, 189-200. 
Meal, The Family, Social Value of— 73, 104. 
Medical Missionary, The— 113-119, 127-136. 
Medical Practice, The Native— 119-122, 128, 139. 
Metlakahtla— 156. 
Method, The Missionary— 14-19, 24, 28, 49, 64, 68, 142, 144, 151, 

156, 163, 166, 167, 169, 171, 174, 188, 194, 197, 198, 200, 

207, 208, 219. 
Missionary and Other Foreign Influences — 21, 41, 55, 56, 66, 110, 

151, 177-188, 198. 
Military Budgets of Christendom — 203. 
Modesty— 73. 
Mohammedansim— 26, 27, 37, 38, 51, 71, 76, 89, 108, 124, 137, 

139, 155, 163, 171, 172, 210, 230. 
Moravians, Their Missionary Work — 48. 
Moslems — (see Mohammedanism). 

Native Christians— 66, 67, 77, 82, 149, 151, 152, 153, 217, 218. 
Native Christian Giving— 45, 48. 

260 



INDEX 

Native Religions, Missionary Attitude toward — 219. 

Neutralized Territory — 202. 

Opium— 126, 134. 

Opportunity, The Missionary— 230, 231, 232. 

Orphanages, The "Iishi" of Japan — 176. 

Paganism, Anti-Social Elements in — 22, 26, 27, 34, 36, 39, 50, 

51, 59, 72, 74, 76, 89, 90, 91, 93, 96, 157, 159, 163, 164, 168, 

186, 187, 211, 212, 220, 240. 
Patriotism, The New, in China — 183. 

Peace, The Missionary and— 176, 177, 185, 186, 201-207, 232. 
Peace Unions — 202. 
Persia— 84, 120, 133, 147, 210, 230. 
Personality, Christian — 12, 55. 
Physicians in China and United States — 127. 
Plagues— 123, 124, 131, 211. 
Pilgrimage, The Mecca, and Health — 123. 
Population, The Decimation of — 179, 180. 
Poverty in Non-Christian Lands— 96, 109, 110, 111, 113, 116, 

126,212. 
Prescription of Native Physician — 122. 
Press, The Mission — 143. 
Prison Reform, The Missionary and — 132. 
Privacy— 101, 105. 
Progress, Theory of — 23. 
Railroads, in China — 198. 
Railroads, The Missionary and — 198, 199. 
Red Cross, The— 202. 
"Red Rubber"— 195. _ 
Reformation and Missions — 234, 235. 
Roberts College— 31. 

Roman Civilization— 59, 60, 80, 108, 109, 117. 
Sanitation, The Missionary and— 78, 102, 118, 124, 125, 151. 
Saxons, The — 68, 81. 

Science, The Native Mind and— 157, 173. 
Schools, Mission— 44, 77, 90, 111, 129, 130, 141-175, 189, 198, 

220, 223, 224. 
Shintoism — 2 5 . 

Siam— 83, 89, 131, 145, 166, 230. 
Slavery— 26, 27, 60, 85, 88, 94, 117, 186, 197. 
Social Service, The Missionary and — 12, 17, 49, 52, 53, 54, 56, 

66, 67, 101, 112, 113, 114, 118, 127, 128, 129, 131, 133, 136, 

138, 143, 156, 178, 207, 208, 215, 219, 220, 239, 240. 
Social Settlement, The Missionary Home a— 99, 100, 105, 106, 238, 

239. 
Socialized Individual, The— 11, 13, 33, 69, 149, 208. 
Sociological Christianity— 14, 66, 82, 83, 91, 112, 114, 118, 129, 

178, 189. 

261 



INDEX 

South Seas— 96, 107, 111, 112, 185, 192, 194, 205. 

Standard of Life— 24. 

Statistics, Missionary— 26, 41-48, 62, 63, 76, 78, 86, 87, 89, 95, 
108, 111, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 135, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 
148, 150, 151, 153, 163, 164, 171, 174, 175, 194, 198, 203, 209. 

Stoic Jurists— 58, 60, 95. 

Struggle, The, for Others— 12, 108. 

Student Volunteer Movement — 47. 

Success, Missionary— 42, 43, 44, 45, 61, 62, 63, 170, 174. 

Suspicion, A Heathen Characteristic — 22. 

Sympathy, A Missionary Contribution— 103, 107, 108, 111, 113. 

Syria— 78, 147, 160, 192, 196. 

Taoism — 50. 

Time Problem, The, in Missions — 62, 63. 
Territory, The Division of, by Missions — 215, 222. 
Trade, The Missionary and — 23, 195-200. 
Trading Companies, Missionary — 199. 
Turkey— 37, 38, 76, 85, 148, 166, 211, 250. 
Tuskegee Institute — 159. 

Uganda— 42, 46, 69, 148, 191, 199, 206, 210. 
Union — 
Of Colleges on Mission Field— 222, 223, 224. 

Cost of— 234. 

Economy of— 229, 233. 

Evangelism — 225. 

Jesus Prayer for — 215, 234. 

Interdenominational — 226, 227, 240. 

Medical Associations — 225. 

Native Church and — 223. 
Unions — 

Denominational — 225, 226. 

Of Missions— 222, 223, 227, 228, 240. 
United Church, The South India — 227. 
Unity in Church at Home — 237. 
Unity on the Mission Field — 215-222. 
Unity, The Spirit of, Universal — 236. 
Usury, Native — 194. 

Villages, Native (Christian and Non-Christian)— 19, 102, 103, 
104, 192. 

Wages in Non-Christian Lands— 109, 212. 
Witch Doctors— 122, 129. 

Woman in Pagan Lands— 20, 26, 37, 59, 71-105, 138, 139, 163- 

169, 213. 
"Yellow Peril," The— 203. 

Zulus— 18, 192, 205. 

262 



INDEX 



AUTHORITIES QUOTED 

AND 

MISSIONARIES REFERRED TO 



Msop — 31. 
Adamson, Dr. — 132. 
Allen, Dr.— 115, 132, 207. 
Ambassador, Chinese — 195. 
Angell, President— 212. 
Ansgar — 62. 
Aristotle— 54, 79. 
Argyle, Duke of — 64. 

Berry, Dr.— 129, 132. 
Bishop, Mrs. Isabel Bird— 72. 
Blytheswood, Principle of — 158. 
Boniface — 144. 
Braddock, Dr.— 132. 
Bradford, Dr. Amory— 238. 
Brahman, A — 155. 
British Commodore, A — 185, 
British M. P., A— 147. 
Buckle— 19, 20, 182. 
Butchart, Dr. James — 128. 

Canadian Blue Book — 156. 

Carey, Wm.— 148. 

Carr, Dr.— 133. 

Carver, Dr. — 37. 

Casartelli, Bishop — 158. 

Cassius — 60. 

Cato— 60, 80. 

Celsus — 54. 

Chalmers, James — 67, 177. 

Chang Ching Yi — 233. 

Chry sostom — 1 60. 

Churchill, Hon. Winston— 200. 

Clark, Wm. Newton— 189. 

Clough, Dr.— 137. 

Coillard, Francis — 113, 186. 

Colenso, Bishop — 18. 

Columba— 62, 144. 

Constantine — 82 . 

Cory, A. E— 134. 

Court, Chinese Supreme — 201. 

Crown Prince of Korea — 135. 

Darwin, Charles — 65. 



Dennis, Dr. James S. — 51, 56, 

196, 197, 207. 
DeToqueville — 73. 
Director of Public Instruction in 

India— 152. 
Dollinger, Dr.— 117. 
Duff, Dr. Alexander— 144, 152, 

171. 
Duncan, Wm. — 156. 
Dye, Royal J., M. D.— 127. 

Edgkins, Dr.— 142. 

Elliott, Sir Charles A. — 56. 

Elmslie, Dr.— 133. 

Emerson — 50. 

Emperor, The Chinese — 184. 

Empress, The Chinese, Dowager 

—135, 179. 
Fairbairn, Dr.— 55, 208. 
Fichte— 51. 
Fisk, John— 49. 
Foster, Hon. John W.— 133, 138, 

185. 
Frazier, Sir Andrew— 20, 31,211. 
French Missionary, A — 169. 
Gaekwar of Baroda — 92. 
Garrett, Frank — 239. 
Gladden, Dr. Washington — 49. 
Gladstone— 31, 155, 177. 
Gibbon— 54 ; 81, 96, 233. 
Gordon, Chinese — 64. 
Governor of New Guinea — 185. 
Governor of the Punjab — 206. 
Gray, Bishop— 199. 
Griffis, Wm. Elliott— 151. 
Gulick, Dr. Sydney— 118. 
Gunga Ram — 56. 
Gutzlaff, Dr.— 142. 
Hale, Edward Everett — 6S. 
Hall, Charles Cuthbert— 160. 
Harnack, Adolph — 60, 61. 
Hart, Sir Robert— 203, 212. 
Henson, Canon Hensley — 239. 

263 



INDEX 



Hepburn, Dr.— 129. 
Hetherwick, Dr. — 175. 
Hindu Native, A— 69, 139. 
Holcombe, Hon. Chester — 109, 

112. 
Hunt, John— 107, 112, 205. 
Hunt, Wm. Remfrey — 135. 

Irish Missionaries — 143. 

Ito, Prince— 29, 135, 183, 212. 

Johnstone, Sir H. H. — 56. 
Jones, Dr. J. P.— 218. 
Journal, Chinese Woman's — 165. 
Journal, The Madras — 155. 
Julian the Apostate — 53, 110. 
Justin — 83. 
Juvenal — 60. 
Kang Yu Wei— 184. 
Katsura, Premier — 149. 
Keeler, Dr.— 121. 
Kelly, Claude— 241. 
Kent, Chancellor — 208. 
Kerr, Dr. John— 128, 132. 
Keshub Chunder Sen — 31, 150. 
Khama the Good — 186. 
Kidd, Benjamin — 51, 52. 
King of Siam— 14, 68, 83, 131, 

150, 177. 
King of Toro— 135, 186. 
Kipling, Rudyard— 307. 
Lankaster, Dr. — 115. 
Lancet, The— 125. 
Laws, Dr.— 158, 175. 
Lecky— 30, 53, 54,55, 111. 
Legge, Dr.— 142. 
Lewanika — 186. 
Li Hung Chang— 129, 133, 135. 
Livingstone, David — 42-69, 132, 
^ 162, 171, 175, 197. 
Lowell, James Russel — 34. 
Lucian — 54. 
Macartee, Dr. — 142. 
Mackay, Alexander— 112, 136, 

193, 199, 206. 
Mackay, Dr.— 104. 
Macklin, Dr.— 134, 135. 
Mackenzie, Dr.— 129, 133, 135. 



McLean, A.— 165. 

Madras, Bishop of — 174. 

Mail, The Japan, — 56. 

Maurice, Frederick Dennison — 
34. 

Martin, W. A. P.— 71, 90, 144. 

Marsden, Samuel — 18. 

Marshall, Professor — 51. 

Marshman, Mrs. — 165. 

Mathews, Shailer— 77. 

Maxim, Sir Hiram — 201. 

Mikado— 135. 

Milne, Dr.— 142. 

Minister of Education, The Sia- 
mese — 166. 

Moffett, Robert— 19, 186. 

Montesquiue — 49. 

Montgomery, Mrs. Helen — 167. 

Morrison, Robert — 142. 

Mott, John R— 136, 228, 229, 
231. 

Mozoomdar — 150, 166. 

M'tesa— 113, 206. 

Muirhead, Dr.— 142. 

Muller, Max — 51. 

Murray, Dr.— 132. 

Nail, The Japan — 56. 

Official, A Chinese— 110, 182. 
Okuma, Count— 149, 213. 
Osgood, Dr. E. I.— 124, 161. 

Packard, Professor — 116. 
Parker, Theodore — 52. 
Parker, Dr. Peter— 132. 
Paton, John G.— 107, 112, 196. 
Patrick, St.— 143. 
Paul, St.— 53, 64, 168, 181. 
Peabody, Professor Francis G. — 

315. 
Pericles — 79. 
Persia, Shah of — 84. 
Philips, Wendell— 33. 
Plato— 54, 60, 79, 80, 87, 137, 208. 
Proverb, Chinese — 165. 
Proverb, German — 150. 
Proverb, Hindu— 72. 

Quintillian— 94. 



264 



INDEX 



Rambai, Pandita— 90, 168. 
Ramsey, Prof essor Wm. — 21, 148. 
Ratzel— 30. 
Reifsneider, Elizabeth, M. D. — 

128. 
Rijnhart, Peter — 205. 
Root, Bishop— 217. 
Root, Senator — 202. 
Rousseau — 53. 
Ruskin, John — 160. 

Sabbatier — 30. 
Seneca— 60, 80, 81, 96. 
Shi, Evangelist — 134. 
Smith, Arthur— 108. 
Spencer, Herbert — 30, 149. 
Speer, Robert E.— 92, 134, 239. 
Stanley, Henry M— 69, 133. 
Stevenson, Robert L. — 67. 
Stewart, James — 144, 157, 162, 

169. 
Storrs, Dr.— 33, 84, 200. 

Tacitus— 57, 81. 
Taylor, Hudson— 229. 
Tenny, President — 130. 
Thoburn, Bishop— 109. 
Thokambu — 187. 



Thompson, Sir Augustus Rivers 

—211. 
Trask, Katrina— 204. 
Traveler, An English — 205. 
Tsuda, Miss— 168. 
Tuan Fang, Viceroy — 182, 183. 
Turkish M. P.— 230. 



Ulfilas— 61, 62. 
Ulpian— 60. 
Underwood, Dr.- 



-184. 



144, 183, 



Verbeck, Guido — 21, 
184, 207. 

Warneck, Dr. Gustav — 177. 
Washington, Booker T. — 189. 
Weardale, Lord— 207. 
Williams, John— 107. 
Williams, S. Wells— 118, 207. 
Williamson, Dr.— 115, 116. 
Willibrord— 62. 

Wilson, Governor Woodrow — 38. 
Wu Ting Fang— 136, 198. 

Xavier — 14. 

Yen, Secretary— 183, 203, 



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